Journal
INDOOR AIR
Volume 32, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ina.12938
Keywords
COVID-19; hospital infection model; PPE; quantitative microbial risk assessment; SARS CoV-2; surface-contact transmission
Categories
Funding
- EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Fluid
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
- Medical Research Council
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Self-contamination during doffing of PPE is a concern for healthcare workers, especially when caring for COVID-19 patients. Factors such as improper glove removal and surface contacts play a critical role in determining the risk of exposure. Various factors such as patient numbers, COVID-19 case proportion, shift length, and probability of touching contaminated PPE can influence the exposure risk for healthcare workers.
Self-contamination during doffing of personal protective equipment (PPE) is a concern for healthcare workers (HCW) following SARS-CoV-2-positive patient care. Staff may subconsciously become contaminated through improper glove removal; so, quantifying this exposure is critical for safe working procedures. HCW surface contact sequences on a respiratory ward were modeled using a discrete-time Markov chain for: IV-drip care, blood pressure monitoring, and doctors' rounds. Accretion of viral RNA on gloves during care was modeled using a stochastic recurrence relation. In the simulation, the HCW then doffed PPE and contaminated themselves in a fraction of cases based on increasing caseload. A parametric study was conducted to analyze the effect of: (1a) increasing patient numbers on the ward, (1b) the proportion of COVID-19 cases, (2) the length of a shift, and (3) the probability of touching contaminated PPE. The driving factors for the exposure were surface contamination and the number of surface contacts. The results simulate generally low viral exposures in most of the scenarios considered including on 100% COVID-19 positive wards, although this is where the highest self-inoculated dose is likely to occur with median 0.0305 viruses (95% CI =0-0.6 viruses). Dose correlates highly with surface contamination showing that this can be a determining factor for the exposure. The infection risk resulting from the exposure is challenging to estimate, as it will be influenced by the factors such as virus variant and vaccination rates.
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