Africa-Press – Tanzania. The World Health Organization and partners have issued an urgent call for concrete action to better protect health and care workers worldwide from COVID-19 and other health issues study estimates that 115,500 health practitioners died from January 2020 to May, this year.
A statement issued on Thursday said the organizations are concerned that large numbers of health and care workers have died from COVID-19, but also that an increasing proportion of the workforce are suffering from burnout, stress, anxiety and fatigue.
The joint statement issued this week, WHO and partners are calling on all Member State governments and stakeholders to strengthen the monitoring and reporting of COVID-19 infections, ill-health and deaths among health and care workers.
“They should also include disaggregation by age, gender and occupation as a standard procedure, to enable decision makers and scientists to identify and implement mitigation measures that will further reduce the risk of infections and ill-health,” the statement added.
WHO has, therefore, urged political leaders and policy makers to do all within their power to make regulatory, policy and investment decisions that ensure the protection of health and care workers.
Partners called upon leaders and policy makers to ensure equitable access to vaccines so that health and care workers are prioritized in the uptake of COVID-19 vaccinations.
“Available data from 119 countries suggest that by September 2021, 2 in 5 health and care workers were fully vaccinated on average, with considerable difference across regions and economic groupings,”
Less than 1 in 10 have been fully vaccinated in the African and Western Pacific regions while 22 mostly high-income countries reported that above 80% of their health and care workers are fully vaccinated.
A few large high-income countries have not yet reported data to WHO.
WHO Health Workforce Department Director Jim Campbell said: “We have a moral obligation to protect all health and care workers, ensure their rights and provide them with decent work in a safe and enabling practice environment. This must include access to vaccines.”
According to a new WHO working paper, it is estimated that between 80, 000 to 180, 000 health and care workers could have died from COVID-19 in the period between January 2020 to May 2021, converging to a medium scenario of 115,500 deaths.
These estimates have been derived from the 3.45 million COVID-19 related deaths reported to WHO as at May 2021; a number by itself considered to be much lower than the real death toll (60% or more than what is reported to WHO).
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