Intervention strategies against COVID-19 and their estimated impact on Swedish healthcare capacity

Jasmine M Gardner; Lander Willem; Wouter van der Wijngaart; Shina Caroline Lynn Kamerlin; Nele Brusselaers; Peter Kasson

Finally, we also considered infections among healthcare workers. Healthcare workers can become infected via three mechanisms: "community" exposure in their households or outside the hospital, transmission among healthcare staff during breaks and other times when personal protective equipment (PPE) is not worn, or occupational exposure to infected patients (either identified as such or not). Given sufficient PPE, occupational exposure should be minimal, and this has been shown in other well-resourced settings. However, at high patient load, PPE has been limiting in a large number of countries, and the Swedish PPE recommendations have recently been reduced, 37 38 potentially in response to PPE shortages. We approximate a 75% reduction in transmissibility within the hospital in order to capture the aggregate effect of PPE usage and non-PPE encounters. There are substantial uncertainties in this estimate-healthcare workers without PPE are at increased risk of infection, so in the absence of universal PPE protocols, unidentified COVID-19 patients pose a higher probability of transmission in the healthcare context than outside. Transmission among healthcare workers . 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.