Tracking COVID-19 in High-Risk Workers
Highlights
- Gather COVID-19 data from healthcare personnel, first responders, and frontline workers
- Vaccine effectiveness, illness characterization, infection rates, and KAP toward COVID-19 vaccines
- Three COVID-19 vaccine doses are more effective than two doses.
From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC needed timely information on COVID-19 illness characterization and vaccine effectiveness in this highly exposed cohort. CDC also needed data on rates of symptomatic and asymptomatic infection and re-infection. Since this population was among the first to receive COVID-19 vaccines, CDC used the platform to produce estimates of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in real-world conditions and continued to update those estimates as new variants emerged. Setting up the infrastructure for gathering the data and then collecting it must be done rapidly to inform policy decisions.
The Research on the Epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 in Essential Response Personnel (RECOVER) study was a prospective, longitudinal cohort study of approximately 3,500 healthcare personnel, first responders, and frontline workers from six U.S. regions. Abt adapted our existing infrastructures, study protocols, and tools to conduct surveillance activities to assess risk and characterize disease epidemiology of COVID-19. We partnered with clinical institutions chosen for their history of conducting respiratory virus research. As part of this effort, our study participants self-collected a respiratory specimen every week for nearly three years.