UW Medicine Finds Low COVID-19 Rate Among Staff

SEATTLE, WA — UW Medicine says a thorough coronavirus testing of all of their staff members has found relatively few infections, which they're crediting to the use of PPE and other safeguards.

Officials say, as the pandemic was starting to hit full swing, they set up two employee testing centers to get all of their symptomatic staff tested for the virus as quickly as possible.

“Once we had data from our two testing centers, we wanted to know whether employees who had direct contact with patients had higher risk of developing COVID-19 than employees who didn’t interact with patients,” said Dr. Nandita Mani, a UW Medicine fellow in infectious diseases.

But, after running those tests, they found something surprising: the doctors and nurses who treated coronavirus patients on the front line, had almost the same infection rate, 5.2 percent, as behind the scenes workers who wouldn't have been exposed, who had a 5.5 percent infection rate. Both of those rates are significantly less than the patient rate: 10.3 percent of UW Medicine patients tested positive for the coronavirus during the same time span.

In total, 3,477 symptomatic UW employees were tested for the virus, and 185 tested positive. Of those, 6 were hospitalized but all have since fully recovered.

The hospital says, they believe this data shows that the use of personal protective equipment has been effective protecting staff even as they treat infected patients.

“Based on our findings, we don’t have strong reason to believe that our frontline healthcare workers are at higher risk of acquiring COVID than other employees or other community members,” said Mani.