DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.
Department of Oncology, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark.
PLoS One. 2021 Sep 20;16(9):e0257684. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257684. eCollection 2021.
Ensuring the safety of healthcare workers is vital to overcome the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We here present an analysis of the social interactions between the healthcare workers at hospitals and nursing homes. Using data from an automated hand hygiene system, we inferred social interactions between healthcare workers to identify transmission paths of infection in hospitals and nursing homes. A majority of social interactions occurred in medication rooms and kitchens emphasising that health-care workers should be especially aware of following the infection prevention guidelines in these places. Using epidemiology simulations of disease at the locations, we found no need to quarantine all healthcare workers at work with a contagious colleague. Only 14.1% and 24.2% of the health-care workers in the hospitals and nursing homes are potentially infected when we disregard hand sanitization and assume the disease is very infectious. Based on our simulations, we observe a 41% and 26% reduction in the number of infected healthcare workers at the hospital and nursing home, when we assume that hand sanitization reduces the spread by 20% from people to people and 99% from people to objects. The analysis and results presented here forms a basis for future research to explore the potential of a fully automated contact tracing systems.
确保医护人员的安全对于克服持续的 COVID-19 大流行至关重要。我们在此分析了医院和疗养院医护人员之间的社会互动。我们使用自动手部卫生系统的数据推断医护人员之间的社会互动，以确定医院和疗养院的感染传播途径。大多数社会互动发生在配药室和厨房，这强调医护人员在这些地方应特别注意遵循感染预防指南。我们在这些地点使用疾病的流行病学模拟，发现无需对有传染性同事的所有医护人员进行工作隔离。当我们忽略手部消毒并假设疾病具有很强的传染性时，只有 14.1%和 24.2%的医院和疗养院医护人员可能被感染。根据我们的模拟，当我们假设手部消毒可以将人与人之间的传播减少 20%，以及将人与物体之间的传播减少 99%时，医院和疗养院的感染医护人员数量分别减少了 41%和 26%。这里呈现的分析和结果为未来探索完全自动化接触者追踪系统的潜力提供了基础。
