ABSTRACT
Background: The aim of our study was to assess the influence of gender and age on reactogenicity by the different vaccines and their combinations. Further parameters were the reduction in working capacity after vaccination and the influence of the time of day when vaccines were administered. Methods We conducted a survey on COVID-19 vaccinations and eventual reactions among employees of 89 hospitals of the Helios Group. On May 19th, 2021 employees received an invitation by e-mail from the chief medical officer with a link to the survey tool. Participation was voluntary and non-traceable. The survey was closed on June 21st, 2021. Results 8,375 participants reported on 16,727 vaccinations. Reactogenicity was reported in 75% of COVID-19 vaccinations. In 23% the capacity to work was affected. Major risk factors were female gender, younger age and vaccine other than BNT162b2. ChAdOx induced impairing reactogenicity mainly after the prime vaccination (70.5%), while mRNA-1273 led to more pronounced reactions after the second dose (71.7%). Heterologous prime-booster vaccinations with ChAdOx followed by either mRNA-1273 or BNT162b2 were associated with the highest risk for impairment (81.4%). The time of day of the vaccinations showed no influence. Conclusions Young women had the highest chance to experience reactogenicity and to be unable to work after COVID-19 vaccination. When vaccinating a large part of a workforce, especially in professions with a higher proportion of women like health care, employers as well as employees must be prepared for a noticeable amount of absenteeism. Trial registration The study was approved by the Ethic Committee of the Aerztekammer Berlin on May 27th, 2021 (Eth-37/21) and registered in the German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS 00025745). The study was supported by the Helios research grant HCRI-ID 2021-0272.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
Background: The scale of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic warrants the urgent establishment a global decentralized surveillance and warning system to recognize local outbreaks and the emergence of novel variants-of-concern. Among the available deep-sequencing technologies, nanopore-sequencing could be an important cornerstone, since it is mobile, scalable and acquisition investments are comparably low. Therefore, streamlined and efficient nanopore-sequencing protocols need to be developed and optimized for SARS-CoV-2 variants identification, in particular for smaller hospital laboratories with lower throughput. Results: We adapted and simplified existing workflows using the midnight 1,200 bp amplicon split primer sets for PCR, which produce tiled overlapping amplicons covering almost all of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Subsequently, we applied the Oxford Nanopore Rapid barcoding protocol and the portable MinION Mk1C sequencer in combination with the ARTIC bioinformatics pipeline. We tested the simplified and less time-consuming workflow on confirmed SARS-CoV-2-positive specimens from clinical routine and identified pre-analytical parameters, which may help to decrease the rate of sequencing failures. Duration of the complete pipeline was approx. 7 hrs for one specimen and approx. 11 hrs for 12 multiplexed barcoded specimens. Conclusions: The adapted protocol contains less processing steps. Diagnostic CT values are the principal criteria for specimen selection. Subsequent to diagnostic qRT-PCR, multiplex library preparation, quality controls, nanopore sequencing and the bioinformatic pipeline can be completely conducted within one working-day.