68 Consecutive patients assessed for COVID-19 infection; experience from a UK regional infectious disease unit

Nicholas Easom; Peter Moss; Gavin Barlow; Anda Samson; Tom Taynton; Kate Adams; Monica Ivan; Phillipa Burns; Kavitha Gajee; Kirstine Eastick; Patrick Lillie

Infection clinician time is another important resource that may not be best used in managing mild respiratory illness that meets the suspected COVID-19 case definition. In recent years, many studies have demonstrated the benefit of ID physician review in terms of clinical outcome and resource utilisation in infections such as Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia 19, 20 and resistant gram-negative infections 21 . Our findings support the assessment of, and testing for, possible COVID-19 by other cadres of healthcare workers, outside the secondary care setting, but supported by specialist physicians and hospital based further diagnostics where needed. The optimum configuration for such a service remains unclear and is likely to vary depending on local constraints, but during the containment phase of the epidemic response there may be time to pilot and compare a range of models before we are forced to move to delay and possibly mitigation strategies. . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.