By Dan Hounsell, Senior Editor, Facility Market

The infection control efforts of healthcare facilities managers have been ramped up and been streamlined considerably since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in February 2020. Part of those efforts has been to identify the most dangerous threats to the health of workers and patients in these facilities. New research is beginning to shed light on these threats. 

The majority of patients who contracted COVID-19 while in hospital did so from other patients rather than from healthcare workers, concludes a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke's Hospital as reported by ScienceDaily. The study provides previously unprecedented detail on the way infections might spread in a hospital context, showing that a minority of individuals can cause most of the transmission.

The researchers analyzed data from the first wave of the pandemic, between March and June 2020. While a great deal of effort is made to prevent the spread of viruses within hospitals by keeping infected and non-infected individuals apart, this task is made more difficult during times when the number of infections is high. The high level of transmissibility of the virus and the potential for infected individuals to be asymptomatic make this task particularly challenging.

Looking back at data from the first wave, researchers identified five wards at Addenbrooke's Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where multiple individuals, including patients and healthcare workers, tested positive for COVID-19 within a short space of time, suggesting a local outbreak might have occurred.