Bacteremia and Blood Culture Utilization during COVID-19 Surge in New York City
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Abstract
A surge of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presenting to New York City hospitals in March 2020 led to a sharp increase in blood culture utilization, which overwhelmed the capacity of automated blood culture instruments. We sought to evaluate the utilization and diagnostic yield of blood cultures during the COVID-19 pandemic to determine prevalence and common etiologies of bacteremia and to inform a diagnostic approach to relieve blood culture overutilization. We performed a retrospective cohort analysis of 88,201 blood cultures from 28,011 patients at a multicenter network of hospitals within New York City to evaluate order volume, positivity rate, time to positivity, and etiologies of positive cultures in COVID-19.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.05.20080044: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. 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:Limitations of the study include paucity of data on other bacterial co-infections and lack of data on patient antibiotic utilization to demonstrate how blood culture utilization impacted therapy. In summary, we observed an …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.05.20080044: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. 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:Limitations of the study include paucity of data on other bacterial co-infections and lack of data on patient antibiotic utilization to demonstrate how blood culture utilization impacted therapy. In summary, we observed an overutilization of blood cultures during a surge of COVID-19 patients to our network of medical centers in New York City and found a very low rate of bloodstream infections among COVID-19 patients. This overutilization was mitigated through a 4 day incubation with likely minimal impact on patient care. Clear communication with ordering providers and hospital leadership regarding the low yield of blood cultures is a necessary step to mitigate overordering and to preserve laboratory functionality during these periods. Laboratories should also consider reducing the incubation period of blood cultures from 5 days to 4 days to further increase their capacity.
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.
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