87% of doctors say they have caught Covid in the last two months

Nearly nine out of ten doctors report having been infected with Covid in the last two months or know other colleagues in the workplace who have been.

This high rate of contagion causes health services across the country to register a large number of absences. The lack of doctors, nurses and other health professionals is identified as the main care deficiency in the current phase of the pandemic (45%). A year ago, this was a complaint of 32.5% of physicians.

The data are from a survey by the AMB (Brazilian Medical Association) with 3,517 doctors from across the country, between January 21 and 31, released this Thursday (3). The majority (52.5%) are on the front lines of public and private services that care for Covid patients.

According to César Eduardo Fernandes, president of AMB, another tragic side of this widespread contamination among professionals is that the remaining doctors end up working harder to replace their colleagues who are away, under a lot of physical and mental exhaustion.

Most doctors declare themselves exhausted (51.1%) and apprehensive (51.6%) with the current moment. The perception is that co-workers are also stressed (62.4%) and overloaded (64.2%).

The survey did not measure the perception of professionals about the increase in verbal and physical aggression in the work environment, but Fernandes says that this is a fact that has worried the entity.

“I understand the dissatisfaction of the population, who wait hours for care, the situation is really dramatic, but we cannot accept aggression against health professionals. They are just as victimized. The doctor is tired, the hospital receptionist is tired, the stretcher-bearer is tired”, says Fernandes.

Another unpublished study by doctor Adriano Massuda, professor and researcher at FGV (Fundação Getúlio Vargas), shows that during the pandemic there was an increase in the workload in health services, but without having a corresponding number of professionals, especially doctors.

“In a health system that was already very scrapped, overloaded, this third wave of Covid comes as another shock to this fragile body. It is expected that this generates all this tension that we are seeing”, says Massuda.

Another fact that has hindered the fight against Covid in the opinion of 86% of doctors interviewed by AMB is the circulation of fake news and information without technical proof.

For them, this misinformation makes it difficult, for example, for people to accept the decisions of health professionals (55%) and or make them pressure them for treatments without scientific evidence (37.7%).

“The numbers disappointed me a little. I expected that all doctors would consider fake news disastrous, criminal, but there is a percentage of doctors who think not”, says César Fernandes.

Massuda also attributes some of the responsibility for this wave of misinformation to doctors allied with the Bolsonaro government.

“Two years of facing the pandemic, so many people dying, and them defending the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, now questioning the vaccine for children without any scientific arguments.”

For the FGV professor, something new is happening in this pandemic that collaborates with the spread of fake news: the deconstruction of the technical authority of the Ministry of Health.

“The Ministry of Health has always played a very important role in communicating with the population in public health campaigns. But when it starts to question the vaccination of children, it decides to carry out an absurd, meaningless public consultation, it is one more factor to get in the way. and create confusion.”

According to the survey, 72% of doctors disapprove of the management of the current Minister of Health, cardiologist Marcelo Queiroga.

“I think we exhausted our patience. Doctors are very tired of this way of being of the current minister, this dubiousness, one time wanting to please the doctors, another time wanting to please their leadership, there is no linear thinking”, says Fernandes.

The AMB survey also measured the perception of a new demand from patients for which public policies are not yet structured: the sequelae of Covid, the so-called long Covid.

About 71% of respondents say they have seen cases of patients with sequelae after healing from the infection in their daily practice, including heart problems and thrombosis (23%), neurological sequelae, stroke (22%) and pulmonary fibrosis (18.9%). %).

“The health system will need rehabilitation medicine aimed at post-Covid, for the treatment of sequels with very serious consequences, such as pulmonary fibrosis, and others, such as headache, fatigue, mood disorder, which directly impact the quality of life. person’s life.”

There is also the damming of other non-Covid demands. Half of doctors (50%) say they are aware of aggravations in diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, which were not taken care of during the pandemic.

“The countries that dealt with the pandemic better organized Covid care and the maintenance of non-Covid care, so as not to have this repressed demand. Here we are seeing more advanced cancers, we have gone back to a situation before 1990”, he says. Massuda.