An adaptive, asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 workforce screening program providing real-time, actionable monitoring of the COVID-19 pandemic

Diego R Hijano, James M Hoffman, Li Tang, Stacey L Schultz-Cherry, Paul G Thomas, Hana Hakim, Richard J Webby, Randall T Hayden, Aditya H Gaur and St. Jude COVID-19 Employee Screening Program Team

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 5, 1-9

Abstract: COVID-19 remains a challenge worldwide, and testing of asymptomatic individuals remains critical to pandemic control measures. Starting March 2020, a total of 7497 hospital employees were tested at least weekly for SARS CoV-2; the cumulative incidence of asymptomatic infections was 5.64%. Consistently over a 14-month period half of COVID-19 infections (414 of 820, total) were detected through the asymptomatic screening program, a third of whom never developed any symptoms during follow-up. Prompt detection and isolation of these cases substantially reduced the risk of potential workplace and outside of workplace transmission. COVID-19 vaccinations of the workforce were initiated in December 2020. Twenty-one individuals tested positive after being fully vaccinated (3.9 per 1000 vaccinated). Most (61.9%) remained asymptomatic and in majority (75%) the virus could not be sequenced due to low template RNA levels in swab samples. Further routine testing of vaccinated asymptomatic employees was stopped and will be redeployed if needed; routine testing for those not vaccinated continues. Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 testing, as a part of enhanced screening, monitors local dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and can provide valuable data to assess the ongoing impact of COVID-19 vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 variants, inform risk mitigation, and guide adaptive, operational planning including titration of screening strategies over time, based on infection risk modifiers such as vaccination.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0268237 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 68237&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0268237

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268237

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().