TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krüger, Sören
A1  - Leskien, Miriam
A1  - Schuller, Patricia
A1  - Prifert, Christiane
A1  - Weißbrich, Benedikt
A1  - Vogel, Ulrich
A1  - Krone, Manuel
T1  - Performance and feasibility of universal PCR admission screening for SARS‐CoV‐2 in a German tertiary care hospital
JF  - Journal of Medical Virology
N2  - Anamnestic screening of symptoms and contact history is applied to identify coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) patients on admission. However, asymptomatic and presymptomatic patients remain undetected although the viral load may be high. In this retrospective cohort study, all hospitalized patients who received polymerase chain reaction (PCR) admission testing from March 26th until May 24th, 2020 were included. Data on COVID‐19‐specific symptoms and contact history to COVID‐19 cases were retrospectively extracted from patient files and from contact tracing notes. The compliance to the universal testing protocol was high with 90%. Out of 6940 tested patients, 27 new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus‐2 infections (0.4%) were detected. Seven of those COVID‐19 cases (26% of all new cases) were asymptomatic and had no positive contact history, but were identified through a positive PCR test. The number needed to identify an asymptomatic patient was 425 in the first wave of the epidemic, 1218 in the low incidence phase. The specificity of the method was above 99.9%. Universal PCR testing was highly accepted by staff as demonstrated by high compliance. The costs to detect one asymptomatic case in future studies need to be traded off against the costs and damage caused by potential outbreaks of COVID‐19.
KW  - admission screening
KW  - COVID‐19
KW  - infection control
KW  - SARS‐CoV‐2
KW  - testing strategy
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-238971
VL  - 93
IS  - 5
SP  - 2890
EP  - 2898
ER  -