Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => COVID-19 => Topic started by: set fair on 15/06/2020 12:53:44
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I presume tthere are. Links please. I'm looking for a study which breaks the data down by medical speciality.
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The statistics would probably be misleading. Elective surgery was stopped in most UK hospitals and almost all doctors were assigned to respiratory medicine and critical care for several weeks.
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It would probably take a largish study to show up, But I'm interested in bad outcomes rather than infection rates and (perhaps surprisingly) it has to do with their specialisation and wouldn't be affected by where they've been assighned in recent months. It has to do with their training.
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You will also have to take into account the huge variability of PPE, and the order in which doctors were assigned to COVID work. It's quite likely that the first wave was handled by respiratory and ITU specialists with fairly inadequate PPE, so I wouldn't be surprised to find a higher rate of infection among that group. On the other hand, they were dealing with a fairly small number of patients in a few discrete locations so there may not be much data from the critical period.
The idea that outcome depends on prior training seems bizarre. It's fairly obvious how outcome might be related to anatomical and physiological parameters, even genetics, but if you infected identical twins equally, it is difficult to see why the neurologist's response would be different from the radiologist's.
Your hypothesis would be of great interest!
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It has to do with their training.
That data is unlikely to have been collected in any study, however it should be easy to do your own study from recorded deaths (bad outcome) as most have been reported publicly. Training history would be possible to follow up.
As Alan says, your hypothesis will be of great interest and we look forward to seeing your results.