City of Hope in Duarte, California, has maintained masking requirements, and this has prevented hospital-acquired #COVID19 there entirely, according to Vijay Trisal, MD, chief medical officer at City of Hope.
“Our policies enabled us to achieve zero nosocomial infections, zero outbreaks.”
@luckytran
Every nosocomial COVID infection is preventable.
But in my home state, forget about preventing nosocomial COVID infections -- they are not even tracking them anymore, at least not in the public dataset that has nosocomial COVID info from before the end of the public health emergency.
I *hope* that hospital-acquired COVID is still being tracked, even though it's no longer made public in this dataset....
Last month I made a Massachusetts Public Records Act request to the Department of Public Health for records of how the state is measuring the risk of nosocomial COVID-19 transmission.
They met the initial deadline to respond by asking for an extension, which ran out yesterday without any update.
The latest HHS guidelines for federal reporting on this(linked below, page 15) changed "Hospital onset" COVID reporting to optional from required in June, just FYI. Not sure what the state of Massachusetts is requiring, locally.
@BE
Circumstantial evidence suggesting that at least one MA hospital is still tracking nosocomial COVID:
UMass Memorial reinstated a staff mask requirement for patient encounters. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/umass-memorial-mask-mandate-staff-covid/
If the goal were to reduce staff exposures/cases/absenteeism, then presumably they'd want masks in staff-only areas too, and not just one-way masking with patients but two-way. So maybe they are specifically concerned with provider-to-patient transmission? Lots of assumptions....