EOHSI

The overall goal of this work is to protect health care workers taking care of COVID-19 patients as well as their families, communities, and ultimately the general population. We are doing this through a prospective cohort study examining factors related to viral transmission and disease severity both within the health care setting as well as workers’ households. We hypothesize that health care workers are at higher risk of acquiring the infection than non-health care workers and will be examining additional risk factors for acquiring the virus and ultimately developing COVID-19.

Across the Rutgers clinical sites, a cohort of 750 Rutgers community members were recruited within a span of 2 weeks. We will test them for the virus as well as viral antibodies at multiple timepoints over a six month period. During this period we will all collect data on possible exposures, use of personal protective equipment, symptoms, and mental health. A subset of participants will be invited to participate in a follow-up study looking at virus transmission within households.

We anticipate that this work will produce immediate, actionable, and translatable knowledge about protecting the healthcare workforce and, by extension, the patients that they treat. In the process, we’ll establish a repository of ~15,000 biospecimens that will serve as a foundation for future mechanistic studies on biomarkers of disease transmission and severity as well as immune response. We anticipate that this work will additionally inform clinical trials of novel interventions and vaccines.

Questions? Please contact us at COVID-HCW@rbhs.rutgers.edu

or 732-235-6409 (New Brunswick)/973-972-3173 (Newark)