Nearly one in three licensed doctors in the United States is older than 60 years, an age-group particularly vulnerable to adverse outcomes from COVID-19, according to a study published yesterday on the preprint server medRxiv. And New York and California, two hard-hit states, have the most older physicians.
Mary Van Beusekom, writing in CIDRAP, quotes the study’s authors to say that “The physician workforce is not only at risk of losing time spent in clinical care due to these exposures, but at a personal risk from severe disease that requires hospitalization and is associated with high morbidity and mortality.” The authors noted that 80 percent of deaths in China were in people 60 and older and that, in the United States, nearly half of hospitalizations and intensive care admissions and up to 80 percent of deaths have been in that age-group.