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BACKGROUND Anamnestic screening of symptoms and contact history is applied to identify COVID-19 patients on admission. However, a- and presymptomatic patients remain undetected although the viral load may be high. METHODS In this retrospective cohort study, all hospitalized patients who received PCR admission testing from 26th March until 24th May 2020 were included. Data on COVID-19 specific symptoms and contact history to COVID-19 cases were retrospectively extracted from patient files and from contact tracing notes. RESULTS The compliance to the universal testing protocol was high with 90%. Out of 6,940 tested patients 27 new SARS-CoV-2 infections (0.4%) were detected. 7 of those COVID-19 cases (26% of all new cases) were asymptomatic and had no positive contact history, but were identified through a positive PCR test. The number needed to identify an asymptomatic patient was 425 in the first wave of the epidemic, 1218 in the low incidence phase. Specificity of the method was above 99.9%. CONCLUSIONS Universal PCR testing was highly accepted by staff as demonstrated by a high compliance. The costs to detect one asymptomatic case in future studies need to be traded off against the costs and damage caused by potential outbreaks of COVID-19. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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Journal_of_medical_virology
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Performance and feasibility of universal PCR admission screening for SARS-CoV-2 in a German tertiary care hospital.
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