GURUGRAM: Four hospitals in the city saw a low infection rate and no deaths among fully vaccinated health care workers in a two-month period from March to May that coincided with the ferocious second wave of Covid that ravaged Delhi-NCR, according to data they have shared with TOI.
Collectively, the data covers 9,383 health care workers.
In all four hospitals – Medanta, Park, Narayana and the state-run Civil Hospital – the share of fully vaccinated healthcare workers with ‘breakthrough’ Covid infections despite the immunity shield was in the 6-7% range.
Most of them were asymptomatic or had “mild to moderate” symptoms and very few needed ICU care, hospital officials said.
The hospitals began looking at infections after 14 days of the second dose.
At Medanta, the data is for the period between March 27 and May 21, at Civil from March 23 to May 19, at Park from March 26 to May 23 and at Narayana from March 28 to May 18.
Dr Virender Yadav, chief medical officer (CMO) of Gurugram, said, “No deaths among health care workers were reported after full vaccination.
If a person is infected with Covid after 14 days have passed since the second dose of vaccine, it is termed a ‘breakthrough’ infection.
In such cases, mortality is negligible.
Thus, vaccination is important for all to curb the spread of the infection.” Medanta’s data shows out of its 4,000 fully vaccinated health care workers, 250 were infected.
Of them, eight had moderate symptoms and two had to be admitted in ICU.
“Most of our health care workers had mild symptoms and recovered soon.
This shows that vaccination provides protection against Covid,” said Dr Sushila Katariya, director and head of internal medicine at Medanta.
Civil Hospital saw ‘breakthrough’ infections in 89 of its healthcare workers, among the 1,425 in inoculated.
Three of them got a severe infection and had to be hospitalised.
Fifteen had moderate symptoms.
“90% were asymptomatic.
Symptoms of infected healthcare workers were sore throat, body ache, muscle pain and gastrointestinal pain,” said CMO Yadav.
At the Park group of hospitals, out of the 3,500 health care staff they fully vaccinated, 206 tested positive but none needed to be hospitalised, officials said.
Park CEO Dr PN Kakar said, “Vaccines were never labelled as 100% successful.
Health care workers went ahead with it as a moral responsibility and duty.
End of the day, they all benefited as, though-post vaccination several doctors got infected and some even lost their lives, (those were) not in our hospital but other places.” At Narayana, 458 healthcare workers had completed both doses and 34 of them got infected.
Dr Swadesh Kumar, consultant and head of emergency and medical services at the hospital, told TOI, “Health care workers are committed to their service 24 hours even in these unprecedented times.
On our hospital premises, the total number of healthcare workers is 597, of whom 458 are fully vaccinated.
Although 34 health care workers got Covid while treating patients, they came back to their jobs after recovery.
Around 15-20% got post-vaccination symptoms after the first dose, and only 2-3% got symptoms after the second dose.
No deaths were recorded.
Vaccination is necessary in the fight against this pandemic.” Among private hospitals, Max Healthcare had last month released data on infections among its employees after both vaccine doses.
The infection rate was similar.
Dr Sandeep Budhiraja, group medical director, Max Healthcare, said, “Since the vaccination drive commenced on January 16 for healthcare workers, close to 14,000 employees across our network hospitals received both doses.
Of this set, 6% got the Covid infection and 90% of those infected were mild cases.
Only 10% required hospitalisation.
All of them recovered well except one elderly clinician who was admitted in ICU but unfortunately succumbed to the disease.
This proves that the vaccine is effective and significantly reduces infection rates as well as severity of the disease.”