An Overview of Health Care Worker Reported Deaths During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Objectives: As of May 13, 2020, 1004 health care worker (HCW) deaths due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been reported globally. This study seeks to organize deaths by demographic group, including age, gender, country, and occupation.

Methods: We collected data from a crowdsourced list of global HCW COVID-19 deaths published by Medscape, including age, gender, country, occupation, and physician specialty.

Results: As of May 13, 2020, of 1004 HCW deaths, 550 were physicians. The average age of physician death is 62.49, skewed right, and nonphysician is 52.62, approximately symmetrical. The majority of U.S. HCW deaths are male (64.1%). General practitioners and family medicine and primary care physicians account for 26.9% of physician deaths. Anesthesiologists and emergency medicine and critical care physicians account for 7.4%. The United States has the highest number of HCW deaths but a similar number as a fraction of national cases and deaths compared with other developed countries.

Conclusions: Among HCWs globally, in the United States there have been more reported deaths of physicians, primary care physicians, males, and HCWs versus opposing groups. Further research is needed to understand relative risks of death due to COVID-19 in each of these demographic groups.

Keywords: COVID-19; Family Medicine; Primary Care Physicians; Primary Health Care; Risk.