Response to “RE: COVID-19 and healthcare workers: A systematic review and meta-analysis.”

Abstract

Letter to the Editor: The purpose of this paper was to extract data for meta-analysis from all comprehensive studies reporting characteristics and outcomes of healthcare workers (HCW) with PCR-proven Covid-19 infection. We included the N (total population) of HCW in all the tables only if actual data concerning this population was provided in the publication. Our requirement for this data was that it be collected by some form of actual survey or testing and not from secondary sources. We did not include data that merely represented an estimate, was a secondary source or had unclear methodology. We were consistent throughout the study to use these criteria. We acknowledge that a limitation of this analysis is that some of the included papers lacked accurate data related to the denominator, resulting in overestimating the result as it relates to an entire population of HCW. Furthermore, we would like to emphasize that the final estimates of percentages and confidence intervals reported in meta-analyses result from estimates of the individual weight of a given study, which is derived from the measures of study size and homogeneity and does not reflect a simple input of the total numbers from all studies into the numerator and the denominator.