Seroprevalence of IgG antibody against SARS-CoV-2 among health care workers of anaesthesia departments from various hospital settings in India

  1. Debaprasad Parai
  2. Hari Ram Choudhary
  3. Girish Chandra Dash
  4. Annalisha Peter
  5. Dipika Saket
  6. Ritesh Roy
  7. Gaurav Agarwal
  8. Saroj Sahoo
  9. Usha Kiran Rout
  10. Rashmi Ranjan Nanda
  11. Sanghamitra Pati
  12. Debdutta Bhattacharya

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Abstract

Background

Health care workers (HCWs) are the most susceptible group to get COVID-19 infection and this group always need special attention as they are the key human resource to contain this pandemic.

Objective

To track down the seroprevalence among a particular group of HCWs working in the anaesthesia department in hospital settings.

Study design

Two rounds of serosurvey were done to track the dynamicity among the 128 and 164 HCWs participants in the first round and second round, respectively. 5 mL of blood was collected and IgG SARS-CoV-2 antibody was tested in Abbott Architect i1000SR.

Results

The seroprevalence found in the first and second round was 12.5% and 38.4%, respectively. A significant number (n=61, 77.21%) of seropositivity came from the asymptomatic HCWs group as found in both the survey. There was no significant association among different age, gender and RT-PCR tested groups.

Conclusion

Routine diagnosis of COVID-19 should be referred among HCWs to identify and act upon unrecognized SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.20.21253819: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementConsent: Only the willing participants were included in this study and written informed consent was obtained from each participant.
    IRB: The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Human Ethics Committee of the Indian Council of Medical Research-Regional Medical Research Centre, Bhubaneswar.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Collection of blood: Sera samples were collected and tested to determine the presence of IgG antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-2 in an automated analyzer ARCHITECT i1000SR (Abbott Laboratories, Chicago, USA) using chemiluminescent microparticle immunoassay (CMIA) technology.
    Abbott Laboratories
    suggested: None
    Statistical analysis: Descriptive statistical analyses were performed by SPSS software (IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 24.0, Armonk, NY) and GraphPad Prism software version 7.0 for Windows (GraphPad Software, La Jolla, California, USA).
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)
    GraphPad Prism
    suggested: (GraphPad Prism, RRID:SCR_002798)
    GraphPad
    suggested: (GraphPad Prism, RRID:SCR_002798)

    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:
    Our study also has a few limitations. First, as our participants were from the anaesthesia department of hospital settings, thus it may not speculate the exact association of immune response among the whole HCW community. Second, underestimation during reporting of the symptoms might be happened due to the immense workload of health workers which force them to neglect mild symptoms and timely diagnosis. In conclusion, health workers are the most susceptible group to get COVID infection. Conditions like asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic make the scenario complicated due to the non-occurrence of routine diagnosis. Although our study has few limitations, there is no such study with health workers only from the anaesthesia department of hospital settings to demonstrate the seroprevalence and its association with symptoms, RT-PCR test, age and gender to our best knowledge. Our result concludes that HCWs should routinely get tested for COVID-19 as most of them may be asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic which indeed a much more concerning situation when it comes to patients’ safety.

    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.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    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.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.03.20.21253819 on medRxiv