Testing for COVID-19 during an outbreak within a large UK prison: an evaluation of mass testing to inform outbreak control

Objectives: The aim of this paper was to describe the results of mass asymptomatic testing for COVID-19 in a male prison in England following the declaration of an outbreak. It provides novel data on the implementation of a mass testing regime within a prison during the pandemic.Methods: The paper is an observational evaluation of the mass testing conducted for 6 months following the declaration of a COVID-19 outbreak within a prison. It investigated the incidence of positive cases in both staff and residents using polymerase chain reaction testing.Results: Data from October 2020 until March 2021 was included. A total of 2170 tests were performed by 851 residents and 182 staff members; uptake was 48.3% for people living in prison and 30.4% for staff. Overall test positivity was 11.6% (14.3% for residents, 3.0% for staff), with around one-quarter of these reporting symptoms. The prison wing handling new admissions reported the second-lowest positivity rate (9.4%) of the eight wings.Conclusion: Mass testing for COVID-19 over a short space of time can lead to rapid identification of ad-ditional cases, particularly asymptomatic cases. Testing that relies on residents and staff reporting symp-toms will underestimate the true extent of transmission and will likely lead to a prolonged outbreak.& COPY; 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of International Society for Infectious Diseases.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Automated summary

This paper presents an observational evaluation of mass asymptomatic testing for COVID-19 conducted in a male prison in England following an outbreak. The study provides novel data on the implementation of a mass testing regime within a prison during the pandemic.