COVID-19, Health and Vulnerable Societies
Michael Quinlan
Abstract
Potter, and Cameron Mustard on workplace infection control procedures and mental health amongst Canadian non-healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study finds that adequate design and implementation of employer based infection controls has implications for the mental health of site-based workers. This is an important finding as the authors recognize with wider implications for managing worker and community health during the pandemic. It adds to a growing body of research on the pandemic's impacts on worker health, including governments' compromising the rights and protections of frontline health and essential service workers because they failed to plan for and mitigate the effects of something predicted by public health researchers and agencies like the WHO for decades In many countries, protections for healthcare workers were compromised by belated government responses, local manufacturing inadequacies/supply chain failures. Where poorly controlled, the level of infection has placed long-term strains on if not overwhelmed healthcare infrastructure (including primary healthcare), in too many instances weakened by decades of short-sighted cost cutting. Tens of thousands of healthcare workers were arguably sacrificed to the infection, with an as yet untallied global death toll (Ministry of Health, 2020).