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Health care workers in Saskatchewan were sick from COVID-19 at a rate lower than the national average consistently through the pandemic.
New statistics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) show about five per cent of all COVID-19 cases in the province are attributable to health workers.
Lynn McNeely, manager of the health workforce information team at CIHI said this number is lower than the seven per cent of all COVID-19 cases in the country made up from health care workers.
“The amount of healthcare workers getting sick from COVID in proportion to the total population of Saskatchewan, they’ve been moving at the same rate,” McNeely explained.
The newly-released data from CIHI stated the per cent of COVID-19 cases attributed to health care workers in July 2020 was 19.4, showing a substantial decline over the past year.
“It likely can be attributed to a number of variables, including early on, improved access to things like personal protective equipment, the sustained use of public health measures and the prioritization of vaccinations among healthcare workers and that’s something we saw across the country,” McNeely said.
At the time of CIHI’s last report, there were just over 65,000 infections across Canada. That number has since increased to almost 95,000.
“There were policy interventions put into place around vaccines, around prioritization for healthcare workers (to help protect them),” McNeely said.
The report showed that Canada’s proportion of health care workers as a share of it’s total COVID-19 cases is larger than that in France, Germany and the U.S. as of June 2021.
Data from Ontario, Manitoba and B.C. shows that personal support workers have more than three times higher risk of getting the virus than physicians, and almost are almost two times more likely to get it compared to nurses.
The illness of health care workers has a significant impact on staffing and the level of care that can be provided during the pandemic. Since COVID-19 began, 43 health care workers have died.
