Chinese medical staff paying ‘too high a price’ in battle to curb coronavirus
- Authorities confirm that 1,716 health care workers have been infected with Covid-19
- Numbers affected are greater than those recorded during the 2003 Sars outbreak; one specialist warns this increases the risk of cross-transmission in hospitals
More than a thousand health care workers have been infected with Covid-19, many of whom contracted the virus that causes the disease in the early weeks of the outbreak when there was a shortage of protective equipment and the authorities said there had been few cases of human-to-human transmission.
One specialist warned that frontline medical workers were paying “too high a price” in the battle to contain the disease and warned that the high number of infected health care staff increased the risk of cross-infection in hospitals.
On Friday the government said a total 1,716 health care workers had been infected with the disease.
The number is far higher than that recorded during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic, although there have been 12 times more confirmed cases of Covid-19.
Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, told a press conference on Friday that the infected medical workers accounted for 3.8 per cent of the total number of Covid-19 cases in mainland China, with 1,502 being from Hubei, 1,102 of whom were from Wuhan city.