BackgroundGreat efforts have been made to minimise spread and prevent outbreaks of COVID-19 in hospitals. However, there is uncertainty in identifying nosocomial vs community-acquired infections. To minimise risks and evaluate measures, timely data on infection risk in healthcare institutions are required.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Notifications to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health of outbreaks in Norwegian healthcare institutions are mandatory by law, but under-reporting is suspected due to failure to identify clusters, or because of human or system-based factors. This study aimed to establish and describe a fully automatic, register-based surveillance system to identify clusters of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) of SARS-CoV-2 in hospitals and compare these with outbreaks notified through the mandated outbreak system Vesuv.
Methods: We used linked data from the emergency preparedness register Beredt C19, based on the Norwegian Patient Registry and the Norwegian Surveillance System for Communicable Diseases.
Background: Understanding and limiting infection in healthcare workers (HCWs) and subsequent transmission to their families is always important and has been underscored during the COVID-19 pandemic. Except in specific and local settings, little is known about the extent of such transmissions at the national level.
Objective: To describe SARS-CoV-2 infection in HCWs and to estimate the risk of HCWs transmitting COVID-19 to their household members, including calculating the secondary attack rate to household members and estimating the risk for hospital workers to contract COVID-19 at home.