SARS‐CoV‐2 infections amongst personnel providing home care services for older persons in Stockholm, Sweden
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Abstract
Background
In Sweden, home care services is a major external contact for older persons.
Methods
Five home care service companies in Stockholm, Sweden, enrolled 405 employees to a study including serum IgG to SARS‐CoV‐2 and SARS‐CoV‐2 virus in throat swabs.
Results
20.1% (81/403) of employees were seropositive, about twice as many as in a simultaneously enrolled reference population (healthcare workers entirely without patient contact, n = 3671; 9.7% seropositivity). 13/379 employees (3.4%) had a current infection (PCR positivity). Amongst these, 5 were also seropositive and 3 were positive with low amounts of virus. High amounts of virus and no antibodies (a characteristic for presymptomatic COVID‐19) were present in 5 employees (1.3%).
Conclusions
Personnel providing home services for older persons appear to be a risk group for SARS‐CoV‐2. Likely presymptomatic employees can be readily identified by screening. Increased protection of employees and of the older persons they serve is warranted.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248511: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all participants in the study. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
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:Weaknesses of the study include the fact that only 5 companies providing home care services participated in the study. There are 12 times as many companies …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248511: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all participants in the study. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
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:Weaknesses of the study include the fact that only 5 companies providing home care services participated in the study. There are 12 times as many companies providing home care services in the region and the companies that participated were not selected at random, but participation was decided on a first-come, first-serve basis (only a minority of the companies had decided to participate when the start date of the study was imminent). Also, the elderly who received the home care services were not enrolled, limiting our ability to document whether services provided by infectious home services personnel may have transmitted infections to the users. We did not enroll the elderly because of issues regarding complexity in obtaining a fully informed and coercion-free consent and issues regarding requirements for documentation of testing results of the users, issues that were not readily resolved. Our findings on the seropositivity among home care service employees are similar to another study [10], implying that there are now independent studies pointing to that this is a risk group for SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Results from TrialIdentifier: We found the following clinical trial numbers in your paper:
Identifier Status Title NCT04411576 Recruiting Current and Past SARS-CoV-2 Infection and COVID-19 in Health… 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.
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