Immunocompromised patients may be at increased risk for complications of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. However, comprehensive data of SARS-CoV-2 infection in solid organ transplant (SOT) recipients are still lacking.We performed a multicenter nationwide observational study within the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STCS) to describe the epidemiology, clinical presentation, treatment and outcomes of the first microbiologically documented SARS-CoV-2 infection among SOT recipients. Overall, 21 patients were included with a median age of 56 years (10 kidney, 5 liver, 1 pancreas, 1 lung, 1 heart and 3 combined transplantations). The most common presenting symptoms were fever (76%), dry cough (57%), nausea (33%) and diarrhea (33%). Ninety-five percent and 24% of patients required hospital and ICU admission, respectively, and 19% were intubated. After a median of 33 days of follow-up, 16 patients were discharged, 3 were still hospitalized and 2 patients died. These data suggest that clinical manifestations of SARS-CoV-2 infection in middle-aged SOT recipients appear to be similar to the general population without an apparent higher rate of complications.These results need to be confirmed in larger cohorts.

Background These last months, dozens of SARS-CoV-2 serological tests have become available with varying performances. A major effort was completed to compare 17 serological tests available in April 2020 in Switzerland. Methods In a preliminary phase, we compared 17 IgG, IgM, IgA and pan Ig serological tests including ELISA, LFA, CLIA and ECLIA on a panel of 182 sera, comprising 113 sera from hospitalized patients with a positive RT-PCR, and 69 sampled before 1 st November 2019, expected to give a positive and negative results, respectively. In a second phase, the five best performing and most available tests were further evaluated on a total of 582 sera (178 and 404 expected positive and negative, respectively), allowing the assessment of 20 possible cross-reactions with other virus. Results In the preliminary phase, among eight IgG/pan-Ig ELISA or CLIA/ECLIA tests, five had a sensitivity and specificity above 90% and 98% respectively, and on six IgM/IgA tests, only one was acceptable. Only one LFA test on three showed good performances for both IgG and IgM. For all the tests IgM and IgG aroused concomitantly. In the second phase, no tests showed particular cross-reaction. We observed an important heterogeneity in the development of the antibody response. Conclusions The majority of the evaluated tests exhibited high performances of IgG/pan-Ig sensitivity and specificity to detect the serological response of moderately to critically ill hospitalized patients. The IgM and IgA tests showed mostly insufficient performance with no added value for the early diagnostic on the cohort tested in this study.

Previous VRE colonization and antibiotic usage are essential parameters for enterococcal infection (by VRE or VSE) during ICU stay. Previous enterococcal infection, co-morbidities and antibiotic usage are associated with VRE colonization upon ICU admission, whereas, patient to patient transmission, co-morbidities and antibiotic usage constitute risk factors for VRE colonization during ICU hospitalization.

Data availabilitySummary statistics generated by COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative are available online (https://www.covid19hg.org/results/r6/). The analyses described here use the freeze 6 data. The COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative continues to regularly release new data freezes. Summary statistics for samples from individuals of non-European ancestry are not currently available owing to the small individual sample sizes of these groups, but the results for 23 loci lead variants are reported in Supplementary Table 3. Individual-level data can be requested directly from the authors of the contributing studies, listed in Supplementary Table 1.

The high prevalence of KPC-Kp enteric carriage in ICU patients at admission dictates the importance of implementation of infection control measures and strict antibiotic policies prior to ICU transfer.