ABSTRACT
Purpose: Despite its critical role in containing outbreaks, the efficacy of contact tracing (CT), measured as the sensitivity of case detection, remains an elusive metric. We estimated the sensitivity of CT by applying unilist capture-recapture methods on data from the 2018-2020 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Methods & Materials: We applied different distributional assumptions to the zero-truncated count data to estimate the number of unobserved cases with a) any contacts and b) infected contacts, to compute CT sensitivity. Geometric distributions were the best fitting models. Results: Our results indicate that CT efforts identified almost all (n=792, 99%) of the cases with any contacts, but only half (n=207, 48%) of the cases with infected contacts, suggesting that CT efforts performed well at identifying contacts during the listing stage, but performed poorly during the contact follow-up stage. Conclusion: This novel approach can be applied to assess the effectiveness of CT. Importantly, the approach described is disease-agnostic, and can be extended to assess the sensitivity of CT for any disease, including COVID-19, for which CT has been identified as a crucial component of the response activities.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: The year 2019 ended with the emergence of a viral disease called Covid-19, which is affecting the decade 2020 by overturning the health, economic, financial and social aspects of humanity. Covid-19 is caused by the coronavirus associated with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV2), which has been declared a public health emergency of international scope and a pandemic, the disease has reached cruising speed throughout the world, affecting more than 204 countries with, as of 6 September 2020, some 26,916,9430 confirmed cases, of which 17,975,661 have been cured and 880,294 deaths. Africa and the DRC have not been spared either. Objectives: We carried out this work in order to assess the level of preparedness of the nursing staff of the Vanga Evangelical Hospital to face the pandemic with the specific objectives of measuring the level of knowledge of the nursing staff on the Covid-19, determining the attitudes of the HEV staff towards the Covid-19 and describing the practices of the staff towards the Covid-19. Method: it is a descriptive study in the province of Kwilu among the staff of the Evangelical Hospital of Vanga from 1st to 31st July. Results: It was found that almost all of the health care staff had heard of Covid-19 and the majority had an average level of knowledge (58.8%). The staff generally had good practice in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic (74.5%), however, their attitudes towards the Covid-19 were somewhat negative as the majority believed they were safe from the Covid-19 (61.4%). Conclusion: Despite a sufficient level of knowledge and overall good practice among health care workers, there were some shortcomings regarding transmission, incubation and the Covid-19 clinic, as well as a somewhat negative attitude that could accentuate the spread of the pandemic, especially in hospitals..