Title: COVID 19 in Indian healthcare workers- a case series.

Introduction: Healthcare workers (HCW) are in the forefront of the battle against COVID 19 and as a group, are deemed to be at the highest risk of infection. There are gaps of knowledge with regards to the impact on HCWs in India. We report the clinical features, severity, need for O2/respiratory supports and outcomes of a large cohort from the Christian Medical College, Vellore.

Methods: The Christian Medical College, Vellore is a 2600 bedded tertiary care institution located in South India. We accessed COVID database of the hospital to identify staff who contracted COVID 19 infection. Since staff are offered comprehensive healthcare free of cost, almost all HCW with COVID-19 infections were treated in our institution. All necessary information was extracted from the hospital records.

Results: During the study period between 1st March and 30 June 2021, covering India?s second wave, largely driven by the delta variant, 10792 health care workers were on the payroll. Of these, 1521(14.1 %) developed COVID-19 infection. Of those affected, 569(37.4 %) were males and 952(62.6 %) were females . The groups most affected were nurses(15.7%), technicians(15.3%) and doctors(14%), of their respective strengths. Fever was the commonest symptom(33.6%), followed by myalgia(23.5%) and sore throat(16%). As per WHO categorization, the vast majority (97.6%) had mild illness, followed by 1.6% moderate and 0.8% severe/critical. Twenty two required oxygen/respiratory supports- 11 low flow O2, 9 NIV and 2 invasive ventilation. Only 2 succumbed to the illness.

Conclusions: We report a large Indian COVID 19 cohort during the 2nd(delta) wave.  To our knowledge this is the largest such study from India.