Speaker
Description
Throughout the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, healthcare workers (HCWs) played a critical role in the response and faced elevated risk of infection. This work investigates the transmission and interaction between the general community and HCWs, aiming to understand how COVID-19 transmission flows between these two populations.
The COVID-19 Infection Survey run by the Office of National Statistics, (ONS-CIS), provides prevalence data in the general community and HCWs in the UK. The ONS-CIS ran from 26 April 2020 to 13 March 2023 and included 14,001 HCWs and 509,127 participants from the general community. We use a generalised additive model (GAM) to estimate prevalence trends from ONS-CIS data, and incorporate these estimates into the computation of time-varying force of infection experienced by each subpopulation, as well as estimating effective and control reproduction numbers. We then explore scenarios to investigate the impact of major policies and events such as national lockdowns, and vaccine rollout in the UK, and evaluate other potential interventions.
Our results show that HCW infection risk was strongly coupled to community transmission. Targeted protection of HCWs alone was therefore unlikely to be sufficient in the absence of broader community control. These findings highlight the need for integrated strategies combining HCW-focused protection, vaccination, and timely community-level interventions to maintain a functioning healthcare system.
