Prevalence of Health Care and Hospital Worker SARS-CoV-2 IgG Antibody in a Pediatric Hospital

Abstract

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Higher Antibody Concentrations in U.S. Health Care Workers Associated with Greater Reactogenicity Post-Vaccination

“…We did not perform baseline anti-spike antibody tests prior to vaccination. However, we did perform baseline anti-nucleocapsid antibody testing as another aim of this study and reported previously that the infection rate was extremely low (1.3%) in a larger number of HCWs participating in early studies at our site [17]. Thus, any additive effect of previously infected individuals can be considered to have negligible impact to these results.…”

“…This study was completed at an academic, tertiary care pediatric hospital in Seattle, WA, U.S. Data were collected from participants enrolled in a longitudinal SARS-CoV-2 IgG serology study over a 12-month period (May 2020-May 2021), as approved by the Seattle Children's Hospital Institutional Review Board. A description of the enrollment process and inclusion criteria was previously reported [17]. Briefly, employed HCWs, including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, administrative staff, social workers, mental health evaluators, security team members, child life specialists, and housekeepers, were recruited if they worked at least one shift in a clinical setting 14 days prior to enrollment, and were not experiencing any COVID-19 related symptoms.…”

Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in pediatric healthcare workers

“…A larger study of 530 pHCWs at an urban children's hospital in the Seattle, Washington also detected a low anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG prevalence of only 0.9% (May 4-June 2, 2020) early in the pandemic, which is more than 4-fold lower than that identified in the Atlanta cohort. However, 2.3% of participants working in the Seattle pediatric ED tested positive, whereas only 0.01% of non-ED personnel tested positive (Tokareva et al, 2021), supporting the premise of the pediatric ED as a likely higher-risk clinical location. Given that the first case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the US was reported on January 21, 2020 just outside Seattle, Washington, Seattle Children's Hospital activated a hospital incident command structure on January 22 in response to the first US case occurring regionally.…”

“…Reports of positivity in HCW cohorts early in the pandemic range widely from 37% in a highly affected area in Spain (Pérez-García et al, 2020) to just 1% positivity in a California community with low COVID-19 levels (Brant-Zawadzki et al, 2020). Few studies have evaluated the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in HCWs working primarily in facilities dedicated to pediatrics (pHCW) (Insúa et al, 2020;Tokareva et al, 2021).…”