Most patients diagnosed with Covid-19 acquire their infection in the community. However, it is not known how much Covid-19 in the first wave of the pandemic was acquired in hospital.
National data may be informative, but locally available data in Oxford are more detailed, potentially allowing more precise estimates of the extent of transmission and risk factors for nosocomial transmission to be determined.
We will use hospital admission and ward movement data, together with Covid-19 testing data, patient demographics and data on staff symptomatic and asymptomatic Covid-19 to estimate the extent of nosocomial transmission and the relative importance of acquisition from other patients versus staff.
See publications:
Transmission of community- and hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 in hospital settings in the UK: A cohort study
Epidemiological data and genome sequencing reveals that nosocomial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is underestimated and mostly mediated by a small number of highly infectious individuals