February 2, 2021

Viral Sequencing Reveals US Healthcare Personnel Rarely Become Infected with SARS-CoV-2 through Patient Contact

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Clinical Characteristics and Health Care Setting

Keywords (Tags): health care workers, transmission

[Pre-print, not peer reviewed] Patient to healthcare worker (HCW) transmission could be rare, according to viral sequencing of 32 SARS-CoV-2 infection clusters involving 96 HCWs in the Upper Midwest. Using 140 possible patient contacts, only 4% of HCW infections were clearly traced to a patient source. In comparison, 10% could be traced to a coworker, 12.5% could be traced to a patient-employee cluster, and 60.4% could not be linked to a patient or coworker. The authors suggest that a majority of the HCW infections occurred in the outside community.

Braun et al. (Feb 1, 2021). Viral Sequencing Reveals US Healthcare Personnel Rarely Become Infected with SARS-CoV-2 through Patient Contact. Pre-print downloaded Feb 2 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.28.21250421