CDC: CCP Virus Killed 358 American Health Workers and Made 68,500 Sick

Nurses are applauded by police and firefighters as they leave Kaiser Hospital at the end of their shift in South San Francisco, California on May 14, 2020. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The CCP virus killed 358 health care workers and sickened 68,522 in the United States, according to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC).

The CDC has yet to find out the status of health care workers across the country as the statistics are currently only available for around a fifth of the total, and of those infected, the death status of only 56 percent of them is available.

National Nurses United, the largest union of nurses in the country, has listed 109 fallen nurses in its Honor Fallen Nurses campaign.

Globally there’s no systematic and standardized record of the number of nurses and health care workers who contracted the virus. However, based on the compilation of various national data, the International Council of Nurses (ICN) said over 600 nurses have died worldwide and over 230,000 health care workers are infected.

“For weeks now we have been asking for data about infections and deaths among nurses to be collected. We need a central database of reliable, standardized, comparable data on all infections, periods of quarantine, and deaths that are directly or indirectly related to COVID-19,” said ICN CEO Howard Catton.

Nurses work at a drive-thru testing site for the CCP virus at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., on May 6, 2020. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

At Greater Potential Risk

An analysis by the ICN says on an average 7 percent of the overall cases of infection globally are among health care workers.

This means out of the total of six million cases of infection globally, 450,000 are health care workers.

The ICN said this data is inconsistent because many countries have not compiled the data and a meaningful data comparison is very challenging, especially with reported infection rates between countries ranging “between 1% in Singapore and more than 30% in Ireland.”

“Nursing is looking like one of the most dangerous jobs in the world at the moment. We need to get this data for every country and work out exactly what is going on that explains the variations that are evident with even a cursory glance at the figures,“ said Catton. ”Only then will we be able to learn how best to keep our nurses safe and prevent any repeat of these terrible statistics in the future.”