Forecasting Hospital Staff Availability During The COVID-19 Epidemic

Chloe N Schooling; Norbert Gyenge; Visakan Kadirkamanathan; James J.P. Alix

Healthcare services around the world are facing their greatest challenge and this challenge has two facets. Firstly, hospitals facing unprecedented numbers of admissions. Second, they are having to simultaneously cope with reductions in staff as frontline healthcare workers are both becoming infected or self-isolating. An initial report from Wuhan, China noted that 2% of those infected were healthcare workers 1 . More recently, media outlets have reported that 5000 health staff have been infected in Italy 2 , a figure approaching 10,000 has been reported for Spain 3 . In the last few days the head of the Royal College of Physicians is quoted as saying "about one in four" of its workforce is presently off work 4 , a survey of clinicians then confirmed the high numbers of staff away from work 5 . Interestingly, in Singapore, a combination of rapid diagnosis and personal protective equipment is believed to have kept the infection rate down among health staff 6 .