COVID-19 cases among health care workers underreported by CDC

FORT WORTH – Fiana Tulip spent the last 10 weeks trying to figure out how her mother, a health care worker in Dallas, contracted and died of COVID-19.

Isabelle Papadimitriou, 64, was a respiratory therapist at the Baylor Scott & White Institute for Rehabilitation. She died on July 4, one week after contracting the novel coronavirus.

Tulip said she learned after talking with her mother’s colleagues and reading her journals and text messages that the hospital failed to alert her mother and other staff members at the rehabilitation center that one of the patients had tested positive for COVID-19.

“It breaks my heart to think about my mom walking into the face of danger, without realizing it.” Tulip said. “There wasn’t a kind of notification system in place.”

Baylor Scott & White did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In July, a spokesperson for Baylor Scott & White declined to answer questions on whether Papadimitriou was working directly with COVID-19 patients who had active infections.

A new report by the National Nurses United union found more than 100,000 cases of COVID-19 infection among health care workers than previously reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As of Sept. 16, at least 258,768 health care workers had tested positive for COVID-19, according to the report. At the same time, the CDC reported 153,306 cases, according to the union’s nationwide study.

The report, titled “Sins of omissions: How government failure to track COVID-19 data led to more than

1,700 health care worker deaths and jeopardize public health,” blames the failure by federal and state governments to track and publicly report “transparent, accurate, and timely” data on the pandemic for health care workers infected and killed by the virus.

Only 16 states are providing infection numbers for all health care workers on a daily, semiweekly, or weekly basis, according to the report. In Texas, hospitals are only required to report daily bed capacity and COVID-19 test results on a daily basis.

“If hospitals are not widely required to publicly disclose their deaths and infection rates, they lack important incentives not to become zones of infection,” states the report. “We cannot allow the more than 1,700 deaths, many of them avoidable, to be swept under the rug, and vanished from our collective memory by the health care industry.”

The report found that minorities represent 58% of the registered nurses who have died of COVID-19. They make up 24% of the profession.