Columbus Regional Health has continued to see COVID-19 cases among its workforce, with about 20 staff members testing positive for the novel coronavirus over roughly the past two months.
A total of 66 CRH staff members have tested positive for COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic, said spokeswoman Kelsey DeClue. On Aug. 12, the hospital system had reported 46 total cases among staff.
The numbers, which are current as of Tuesday, cover the hospital system’s entire workforce, including Columbus Regional Hospital and all other inpatient and outpatient CRH facilities.
So far, no CRH employees have died from COVID-19, and CRH officials are unaware of any staff being hospitalized due to the virus.
As of Tuesday, two CRH employees who had tested positive were still quarantining and there had been no new positive cases among staff since Oct. 12, DeClue said.
CRH officials said the number of positive cases among staff is largely in line with what other hospital systems across the country are seeing, particularly based on the size of the hospital system’s service area.
DeClue said it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when and where someone could have been exposed to COVID-19, meaning that it is unclear how many employees were infected with the virus at a CRH facility versus outside of work settings.
“Just like our community positives continue to go up, we’ve seen, albeit, fluctuating numbers, but we continue to have workforce positives,” DeClue said. “And I think it’s just a reflection of the continued guard and attention that we all have to keep for this. We’re seeing it in the patients we’re treating in the community that we’re serving, but we’re also seeing it in our workforce.”
Health care workers have been cheered as heroes around the world during the pandemic, and many workers around the world have found the challenge of treating persistent spikes in patients to be exhausting, The Associated Press reported.
A study of 1,200 Chinese hospital workers found half reported symptoms of depression and 44% reported signs of anxiety amid the coronavirus outbreak there, according to wire reports. The United Nations said frontline healthcare workers faced “exceptional stress” in the pandemic, and that ensuring their mental health is critical to the world’s recovery.
Locally, there have only been a handful of days since early March when there have not been any patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at Columbus Regional Hospital.
So far this year, there have been at least 149 days in which there were at least five people hospitalized with COVID-19 at CRH, including at least 82 days with at least 10 people hospitalized and at least 42 days with at least 15 people hospitalized, according to hospital records.
“I think what we call pandemic fatigue is something that we are all feeling, and our frontline workers are certainly no exception — and that’s an understatement,” DeClue said. “These brave people have been doing this from the very beginning with really no let up. COVID has never gone away from us for this whole year.”
