China says 1,700 medical workers have been infected by coronavirus

For more than a month, medical workers in Hubei, the province at the center of the coronavirus outbreak, have been working nearly nonstop even as they struggled with a shortage of personal protective equipment such as masks, gowns and safety goggles.

For the first time on Friday, China disclosed figures that drive home the risks faced by those on the front line: 1,716 medical workers have contracted the virus and six of them have died. Of those people, 1,502 were in Hubei Province, with 1,102 of them in Wuhan, the provincial capital and the center of the outbreak…

“I think it’s quite concerning,” said Benjamin Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. “Health care workers face the challenge of caring for a substantial number of patients in Wuhan. It’s worrying to discover that a number of them have been infected.”

Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, said the numbers of infected workers represented 3.8 percent of China’s overall confirmed infections as of Feb. 11.