ABSTRACT
Introduction: International guidelines recommend hospital care for patients with severe Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), but fragile health care systems struggle to cope with high number of admissions, placing patients at risk of receiving substandard care. We describe an outpatient ambulatory surveillance and treatment strategy (OPAT) for health care workers (HCWs) with severe COVID-19 during low hospital bed availability periods in Mexico City. Methods: In this observational, descriptive, retrospective study, we included HCWs with severe disease for whom there were no hospital beds available at the time of evaluation. We provided daily assessments by infectious disease specialists, daily ambulatory steroid, oral thromboprophylaxis and domiciliary low-dose oxygen. We recorded the number of patients who recovered, were hospitalized or died on follow-up. Results: From 18 March 2020 to 16 July 2021, 1739 HCWs attended our service. A total of 540 were diagnosed with COVID-19. Seventy-four had severe COVID-19 and needed hospitalization. Immediate hospitalization was not possible in 56 patients who were sent to the OPAT and included in our study. Twenty-four patients subsequently required hospitalization and 32 recovered as outpatients. Conclusions: We describe a feasible and safe outpatient management strategy for HCWs with severe COVID-19 in a low-resource setting.
ABSTRACT
In-house assays for the diagnosis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by quantitative reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), are feasible alternatives, particularly in developing countries. Cycle threshold (Ct ) values obtained by qRT-PCR were compared with clinical and laboratory data from saliva of inpatients with COVID-19 and asymptomatic health workers (AHW) were studied. Saliva specimens from 58 inpatients confirmed by qRT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 using nasopharyngeal specimens, and 105 AHW were studied by qRT-PCR using three sets of primers for the N (N1, N2, and N3) gene of SARS-CoV-2, according to the CDC Diagnostic Panel protocol, showing a positivity of 88% for inpatients and 8% for AHW. Bivariate analysis revealed an association between Ct < 38.0 values for N2 and mechanical ventilation assistance among patients (p = .013). In addition, values of aspartate-transaminase, lactate dehydrogenase, and ferritin showed significant correlations with Ct values of N1 and N3 genes in inpatients. Therefore, our results show that Ct values correlate with some relevant clinical data for inpatients with COVID-19.