Secondary Use of COVID-19 Symptom Incidence Among Hospital Employees as an Example of Syndromic Surveillance of Hospital Admissions Within 7 Days.

Importance: Alternative methods for hospital occupancy forecasting, essential information in hospital crisis planning, are necessary in a novel pandemic when traditional data sources such as disease testing are limited.

Objective: To determine whether mandatory daily employee symptom attestation data can be used as syndromic surveillance to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations in the communities where employees live.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cohort study was conducted from April 2, 2020, to November 4, 2020, at a large academic hospital network of 10 hospitals accounting for a total of 2384 beds and 136 000 discharges in New England.