Prioritizing COVID-19 tests based in Participatory Surveillance and Spatial Scanning.

Leal Neto, O. B.; Santos, F. A.; Lee, J. Y.; Albuquerque, J.; Souza, W. V.

Objectives The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the generation of priority areas for Covid-19 testing combining participatory surveillance and traditional surveillance. Design The study is a descriptive transversal, where was performed in the city of Caruaru, Pernambuco state, within the period of 20/02/2020 to 05/05/2020. It was considered all official reports for flu syndromes notified by municipality health department and the data collected through the participatory surveillance platform Brasil Sem Corona. Methods To verify a correlation between Participatory Surveillance (PS) and Traditional Surveillance (TS), it was carried out a linear regression. Results The PS has showed in Caruaru 861 active users, presenting an average of 1.2 report per user per week. It was started in March 20th and is officially used by the local health authority in order to improve the quality of information from traditional surveillance system. Regarding to the respiratory syndrome cases from TS, it was found out 1,588 individuals that were positive for this clinical outcome. The spatial scanning analysis has detected 18 clusters and 6 of them have presented statistical significance (p-value < 0.1). Clusters 3 and 4 presented an overlapping and this area was chosen by local authority to deploy the Covid-19 serology, where 50 individuals were tested. From there, 32% (n=16) presented reagent results for antibodies related to Covid-19. Conclusion The use of alternative methods as participatory surveillance showed a relevant role taking advantage on the insertion at community levels to complement traditional surveillance system.