COVID-19 is here to stay. As restrictions and human testing have waned, new research is tackling the challenge of how we can monitor, predict, and prevent cases and outbreaks of COVID-19, especially among vulnerable groups like hospitalized patients. One approach is environmental surveillance.
The most well-known incarnation is wastewater surveillance, which rose in prominence following the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the Coronavirus in the Urban Built Environment research team, also known as CUBE, is exploring an alternative-;swabbing the floors. In a recent study at two hospitals in Ontario, CUBE researchers swabbed the floors of healthcare worker areas, such as change rooms, meeting rooms and staff washrooms, and observed a strong association between the amount of SARS-CoV-2 viral matter found on the floor and the number of cases and outbreaks of COVID-19 in the hospital.
"The association between floor swabs and human cases and outbreaks was something we had previously observed in long-term care homes, and we wanted to test the hypothesis in the hospital setting," says Dr. Caroline Nott, Infectious Disease Physician at The Ottawa Hospital, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa Department of Medicine, and one of the principal investigators of CUBE. For every 10-fold increase in the amount of virus detected on the floor, the researchers observed a corresponding 15-fold increase in patient cases and a 22-fold higher odds of a COVID-19 outbreak.
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