Risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in healthcare workers outside hospitals: A real-life immuno-virological study during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Objectives: Most COVID-19 related infections and deaths may occur in healthcare outside hospitals. Here we explored SARS-CoV-2 infections among healthcare workers (HCWs) in this setting.

Design: All healthcare providers in Stockholm, Sweden were asked to recruit HCWs at work for a study of past or present SARS-CoV-2 infections among HCWs.

De novo sequence assembly requires bioinformatic checking of chimeric sequences.

De novo assembly of sequence reads from next generation sequencing platforms is a common strategy for detecting presence and sequencing of viruses in biospecimens. Amplification artifacts and presence of several related viruses in the same specimen can lead to assembly of erroneous, chimeric sequences. We now report that such chimeras can also occur between viral and non-viral biological sequences incorrectly joined together which may cause erroneous detection of viruses, highlighting the importance of performing a chimera checking step in bioinformatics pipelines.