Women, black, under 60 years old: the profile of nurses who are victims of Covid-19

A sociological study by the National School of Public Health (ENSP/Fiocruz) profiled doctors and nursing professionals killed by Covid-19 in Brazil.

The search, Published in the magazine Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, revealed that about 80% of nurses and nursing technicians or assistants were aged up to 60 years, most of them women, black and brown. Among doctors, 75% of the victims were above this age group.

The main reasons for the difference pointed out in the article are the most common types of employment relationships in each profession and the average age of professionals when entering the labor market.

“Nursing has a more institutional insertion, salaried and with predetermined working time. A good part of nursing in Brazil has guaranteed the formal right to retirement. In medicine it is exactly the opposite, because unfortunately doctors are increasingly autonomous in the professional market. The other issue is that nursing categories enter the labor market at very different stages of life”, explained Fiocruz researcher Maria Helena Machado, the main author of the article, in a statement.

“Technicians can start the journey around the age of 18, for example. Nurses, like doctors, first need to graduate from university, but the medical course is longer, causing these professionals to enter the market later, which also contributes to the extension of their careers”, he adds.

For the study, data on deaths from Covid-19 from March 2020 to March 2021 were considered. In all, 622 doctors, 200 nurses and 470 nursing assistants and technicians were counted. The analyzes were based on data from the Federal Medicine and Nursing Councils (CFM and Cofen) and from the Fiocruz death inventory study.

Analysis highlights

In addition to being mostly up to 60 years old, the nursing professionals who died from Covid-19 were women, black and brown. Among victimized nurses, 59.5% were women, while among nursing assistants, they totaled 69.1%.

Regarding the correlation between color or race and deaths of nursing professionals, the survey showed that 31% of nurses who died from Covid-19 were white, and 51%, black and brown. Among assistants and technicians, 29.6% were white and 47.6% were black and brown.

In the case of doctors, there was an absolute predominance of men killed by Covid-19: 87.6%, against 12.4% of women. The research explains that, only in 2009, female doctors became the majority among new registered in professional councils.

Therefore, among older doctors, who were the majority among those killed by Covid-19, men predominate. The profile of nursing teams is historically more feminine: women are around 85% of the total. Data on color and/or race are not available for physicians.

Another clipping of the survey shows how deaths from Covid-19 are related to medical specialties. Those who work in the areas of assistance and continuous care for large populations were the ones who died the most in the pandemic. Specialists in obstetrics-gynecology, internal medicine, pediatrics and general surgery accounted for 279 of the 622 physician deaths.

“Even in times of a pandemic, they would not be able to restrict their activities, whether in public or private establishments, including in medical offices, almost always without the necessary biosecurity apparatus, therefore they were not a priority target of biosecurity policies against the pandemic”, point out the authors in part of the article.

Inequality between the regions of the country is another highlight of the study. In the ranking of deaths in the three categories, the polarization of the states in the region with the largest contingents, the Southeast, in contrast to the states in the North region, which has the lowest number of doctors and nursing professionals in Brazil. Four states in the two regions were the most affected by professional losses – Pará and Amazonas (North) and Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Southeast).

Maria Helena Machado classified the data as “a real, raw and hard photograph of the social inequality that prevails in the country and in the Unified Health System [SUS]”. The author also highlighted the complexity of the Brazilian North.

“It is a region with a large population, heterogeneous and dispersed in seven states. A large territorial extension, which should generate special policies. It is there that the percentage is hugely different from the Southeast and South regions of the country. It is there that one can clearly see where the genocide of professionals took its most acute form. It is where the worst working conditions are found and the population desperate for care is most crowded,” said the researcher from Fiocruz.

In the North there are only 4.5%, 7.6% and 8.7%, respectively, of the number of doctors, nurses and nursing technicians in the country, but professional losses were 16.1%, 29.5% and 23.2%. The imbalance also occurred in the Midwest, but to a lesser extent.

With superlative figures in the composition of the contingent of professionals, the Southeast region concentrates more than half (53%) of the country’s physicians, 45.1% of nurses and 48.9% of technicians. However, the percentage of deaths of these workers in the pandemic were proportionally lower: 34.7%, 26.5% and 32.1%, respectively.

Three states stand out in terms of medical deaths: Rio de Janeiro (15.8% of the total), São Paulo (11.3%) and Pará (10.1%), the latter being responsible for 63 of the 100 deaths in the North region. With regard to nurses, the three highlighted states are Amazonas (12.5%), São Paulo (10.5%) and Rio de Janeiro (9.5%).

With great technical and strategic importance, doctors and nursing professionals add up to more than 2.9 million professionals, which represents 72.5% of the total health workforce in the country. These numbers attest to the hegemony and perpetuity of this strategic professional contingent for the SUS, which proved to be essential and essential in the pandemic.

(With information from the Fiocruz News Agency)