Prevalence and Clinical Presentation of Health Care Workers With Symptoms of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in 2 Dutch Hospitals During an Early Phase of the Pandemic

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Abstract

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.23.20041913: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The study was reviewed by the Ethics Committee Brabant, the Netherlands (METC Brabant/20.134/NW2020-26).
    Consent: The study was judged to be beyond the scope of the Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act and a waiver of written informed consent was granted.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variableStudy design: A cross-sectional study with short-term follow-up was conducted in two teaching hospitals (700-bed Amphia Hospital, Breda, the Netherlands; 800-bed Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital, Tilburg, the Netherlands), employing 9,705 HCWs, 18% of whom are male (Figure 1).

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    All analyses were performed with SPSS version 25.0 (IBM, Armonk, NY, USA).
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    A limitation of our evaluation is that screening of HCWs was based on the presence of fever or mild respiratory symptoms in the last ten days, and that no data were collected in HCWs without these symptoms. The sensitivity and specificity of the reported symptoms could therefore not be estimated. In conclusion, during the containment phase and within two weeks after the first Dutch case was detected, a substantial proportion of HCWs with fever or respiratory symptoms were infected with SARS-CoV-2, probably caused by acquisition of the virus in the community during the early phase of local spread. This observation confirms the insidious nature of SARS-CoV-2 spread, given the high prevalence of mild clinical presentations that may go undetected.8 The spectrum of relatively mild symptoms present in HCWs with COVID-19, frequently not including fever, asks for less stringent use of the currently recommended case-definition for suspected COVID-19.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.