Journal article
The burden and dynamics of hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 in England
- Abstract:
- Hospital-based transmission had a dominant role in Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) epidemics1,2, but large-scale studies of its role in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are lacking. Such transmission risks spreading the virus to the most vulnerable individuals and can have wider-scale impacts through hospital-community interactions. Using data from acute hospitals in England, we quantify within-hospital transmission, evaluate likely pathways of spread and factors associated with heightened transmission risk, and explore the wider dynamical consequences. We estimate that between June 2020 and March 2021 between 95,000 and 167,000 inpatients acquired SARS-CoV-2 in hospitals (1% to 2% of all hospital admissions in this period). Analysis of time series data provided evidence that patients who themselves acquired SARS-CoV-2 infection in hospital were the main sources of transmission to other patients. Increased transmission to inpatients was associated with hospitals having fewer single rooms and lower heated volume per bed. Moreover, we show that reducing hospital transmission could substantially enhance the efficiency of punctuated lockdown measures in suppressing community transmission. These findings reveal the previously unrecognized scale of hospital transmission, have direct implications for targeting of hospital control measures and highlight the need to design hospitals better equipped to limit the transmission of future high-consequence pathogens.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 10.2MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41586-023-06634-z
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature More from this journal
- Volume:
- 623
- Pages:
- 132–138
- Place of publication:
- England
- Publication date:
- 2023-10-18
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-09-12
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1476-4687
- ISSN:
-
0028-0836
- Pmid:
-
37853126
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1546392
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1546392
- Deposit date:
-
2023-10-23
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Cooper et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record