Assessing COVID-19 cohorting strategies in a UK district general hospital during the first wave of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Introduction Patient-to-patient transmission has a well-recognised role in nosocomial COVID-19 infections,1 but identifying and isolating infectious individuals is challenging, due to limitations in the speed and accuracy of testing.2 To mediate this, many hospitals attempted to cohort patients based on suspicion of COVID-19 infection.3 We aimed to assess whether this strategy was successful at a district general hospital (DGH) in Oxfordshire. Patients are triaged at admission according to their likelihood of COVID-19 infection, with high/medium risk patients being admitted to EAU and low risk patients being admitted ward A. Patients requiring longer stays are then moved to ward B (high risk) or C (medium risk), depending on risk. By contrast, there were significant periods of exposure in EAU (Table 1), with over a quarter of the hours susceptible patients spent in six of the eight bays being exposed to at least one other infectious patient.