Infection risk for hospital cleaners twice that of ICU doctors

HOSPITAL cleaners are more than twice as likely to be infected by Covid-19 than doctors and nurses due to the different types of PPE worn, researcher have claimed.

Intensive care staff were the least likely to contract the virus, according to a study by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and published in the BMJ journal Thorax.

Prof Alex Richter, its lead author, offered to test staff with no Covid-19 symptoms for both current and previous infection. Samples were collected for 516 staff who were at work over a 24-hour period over April 24-25, around a month after lockdown.

They were asked to report any illnesses consistent with Covid from the previous four months, and information on ethnicity and department of work was also recorded.

Cleaners had the highest seroprevalence (34.5 per cent), followed by clinicians working in acute medicine (33 per cent). The lowest seroprevalence was found among staff working in intensive care medicine (15 per cent), emergency medicine (13 per cent) and general surgery (13 per cent). Workers of Bame backgrounds were also nearly twice as likely to have already had the infection as their white colleagues.

♦ University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust has “apologised unreservedly” to the families of patients who contracted coronavirus at Weston General Hospital in May and died. A “robust” internal investigation found that 31 patients had died after contracting the virus while an inpatient at the hospital and in 18 of the patients, the infection may have contributed. The hospital stopped accepting new patients on May 25 and reopened fully in June.