SARS-Coronavirus-2 cases in healthcare workers may not regularly originate from patient care: lessons from a university
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RESEARCH
SARS‑Coronavirus‑2 cases in healthcare workers may not regularly originate from patient care: lessons from a university hospital on the underestimated risk of healthcare worker to healthcare worker transmission Sandra Schneider1, Brar Piening1, Pauline Assina Nouri‑Pasovsky1, Anne Caroline Krüger2, Petra Gastmeier1 and Seven Johannes Sam Aghdassi1*
Abstract Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) represents an unprecedented healthcare challenge. Various SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks in healthcare facili‑ ties have been reported. Healthcare workers (HCWs) may play a critical role in the spread of the virus, particularly when asymptomatic. We examined four healthcare-associated outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 infections that occurred at a university hospital in Berlin, Germany. We aimed to describe and analyze the spread of the virus in order to draw conclusions for effective containment of SARS-CoV-2 in healthcare facilities. Methods: Healthcare-associated outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 infections were defined as two or more laboratory con‑ firmed infections with SARS-CoV-2 where an epidemiological link within the healthcare setting appeared likely. We focused our analysis on one of three sites of the Charité-University Medicine hospital within a 2 month period (March and April 2020). Results: We observed four healthcare-associated outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 infections, with a total of 24 infected per‑ sons (23 HCWs and one patient). The outbreaks were detected in the departments of nephrology and dialysis (n = 9), anesthesiology (n = 8), surgical pediatrics (n = 4), and neurology (n = 3). Each outbreak showed multiple unprotected contacts between infected HCWs. A combination of contact tracing, testing, physical distancing and mandatory con‑ tinuous wearing of face masks by all HCWs was able to contain all four outbreaks.
*Correspondence: seven‑johannes‑[email protected] 1 Institute of Hygiene and Environmental Medicine, CharitéUniversitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, Germany Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view
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