PPE while protecting healthcare workers from exposure to the COVID-19 virus in healthcare settings.

Healthcare workers who are minority, male or older have a higher rate of death from COVID-19 than their worker peers and non-healthcare workers, a new study finds. What’s more, mortality risk is tied to certain clinical indicators, investigators say.

The researchers compared COVID-19 deaths in healthcare workers with three control groups: workers who did not die, non-workers who died and non-workers who did not die. Patient data were obtained from Jan. 1, 2020 to Oct. 12, 2021, from across the United States. 

Workers who were aged 50 years or older, male, Black or Asian experienced significantly more deaths than the matched controls. The finding mirrors those of several studies on the general population, reported Shao Lin, MD, PhD, of the University of Albany in New York and colleagues. 

Healthcare workers were more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions, shortness of breath, fever, cough and gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea, the researchers also found. Pre-existing chronic conditions were the most important predictor of COVID-19 deaths, they reported.

Worker deaths peaked once

Although COVID-19 deaths in the general population saw three distinct peaks, deaths among healthcare workers only peaked during the first surge. They then fell after April 2020 and remained low, Lin and colleagues reported. This finding may be attributed to healthcare workers’ relatively early and high immunization rate, access to improved personal protective equipment and healthcare facilities, and early detection and treatment, they theorized.

Notably, investigators found that the fatality rate in the general population (2.48%) was more than seven-fold higher than that of the healthcare workers, who died at a rate of 0.33%. This difference could be due to better access to healthcare and treatment, which may have prevented more deaths in this population, they wrote.

Full findings were published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.