Regular testing of asymptomatic healthcare workers identifies cost-efficient SARS-CoV-2 preventive measures
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Discuss this preprint
Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Protecting healthcare professionals is crucial in maintaining a functioning healthcare system. The risk of infection and optimal preventive strategies for healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic remain poorly understood. Here we report the results of a cohort study that included pre- and asymptomatic healthcare workers. A weekly testing regime has been performed in this cohort since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to identify infected healthcare workers. Based on these observations we have developed a mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission that integrates the sources of infection from inside and outside the hospital. The data were used to study how regular testing and a desynchronisation protocol are effective in preventing transmission of COVID-19 infection at work, and compared both strategies in terms of workforce availability and cost-effectiveness. We showed that case incidence among healthcare workers is higher than would be explained solely by community infection. Furthermore, while testing and desynchronisation protocols are both effective in preventing nosocomial transmission, regular testing maintains work productivity with implementation costs.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.01.21258124: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: 2.2 Internal testing pipeline: The Study was approved by the ethical committee of the Canton of Bern (2020-00563). Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis 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:A possible limitation is that we assumed an hospitalization rate of 2.5% throughout the epidemic, from which several model parameters are then …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.01.21258124: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: 2.2 Internal testing pipeline: The Study was approved by the ethical committee of the Canton of Bern (2020-00563). Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis 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:A possible limitation is that we assumed an hospitalization rate of 2.5% throughout the epidemic, from which several model parameters are then estimated. Furthermore, we did not consider reinfections among the cohort of healthcare workers over the studied period, but they could be worth including in future models over longer periods where reinfection would be more likely. Although variations in the hospitalization rate and reinfections would lead to different parameters and in turn, case incidence outside and possibly inside the hospital, these do not affect the conclusions of our study regarding the effectiveness of preventive interventions. In summary, our study showed that frequent and widespread testing of pre- and asymptomatic healthcare workers is effective in detecting infections and preventing transmission between coworkers while optimising work output and cost-effectiveness.
Results from TrialIdentifier: We found the following clinical trial numbers in your paper:
Identifier Status Title NCT04333862 Recruiting Assessment of Covid-19 Infection Rates in Healthcare Workers… 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.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-
