Dr. Robert Klugman, Associate Vice President and Medical Director Employee and Occupational Health Services
Because SHARE members have been asking, we put that question to Dr. Robert Klugman. Among other things, Dr. Klugman serves as UMass Memorial’s Medical Director of Employee Health. Specifically, we wanted to understand: How does UMass Memorial know that the employees who’ve recently gotten COVID have done so in the community? How do we know most of them didn’t contract the disease while working in our hospital?
Here’s what Dr. Klugman had to say about Covid-19 infections in healthcare workers in our hospital:
Presently, Omicron makes up essentially all the infections we are seeing.
It is highly contagious, and requires far fewer virus particles to be transmitted than Delta and others, regardless of vaccination status.
We track all healthcare workers who contract Covid-19 and have analyzed transmission patterns for many months, both in terms of patient-caregiver as well as caregiver-caregiver.
We have had a huge upswing of cases since late December with the advent of Omicron.
Despite literally hundreds of infections, we have seen only rare patient-caregiver and caregiver-caregiver infections. This includes our ED’s, where Covid is prevalent, as well as Covid units. This is, in part, due to masking, distancing, PPE.
We track healthcare workers who test positive and report that they having eaten with, sat with, spent time with other healthcare workers without consistent masking and distancing, and have had very very few of those potentially exposed test positive from these exposures.
We have had countless reports of ill family members, friends and other outside contacts as the source of a HCW infection and in many cases, staff have not been on site or work remotely when become positive.