Estimating COVID-19 recovery time in a cohort of Italian healthcare workers who underwent surveillance swab testing

The COVID-19 pandemic is putting a huge strain on the provision and continuity of care. The length of sickness absence of the healthcare workers as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection plays a pivotal role in hospital staff management. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the timing of COVID-19 recovery and viral clearance, and its predictive factors, in a large sample of healthcare workers. This is a retrospective cohort study. The analysis was conducted on data collected during the hospital health surveillance programme for healthcare staff at the University Hospital of Verona; healthcare workers were tested for SARS-CoV-2 through RT-PCR with oronasopharyngeal swab samples. The health surveillance programme targeted healthcare workers who either had close contact with SARS-CoV-2–infected patients or were tested as part of the screening-based strategy implemented according to national and regional requirements. Recovery time was estimated from the first positive swab to two consecutive negative swabs, collected 24 h apart, using survival analysis for both right-censored and interval-censored data. Cox proportional hazard was used for multivariate analysis. During the health surveillance programme, 6455 healthcare workers were tested for SARS-CoV-2 and 248 (3.8%, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 3.4–4.3) reported positive results; among those who tested positive, 49% were asymptomatic, with a median age of 39.8 years, which is significantly younger than symptomatic healthcare workers (48.2 years, P 20 days to test negative on two consecutive swabs. Hospitalised healthcare workers (4.8%) were older and had a significantly longer recovery time compared with non-hospitalised healthcare workers in both analyses (33.5 vs 24 days, P = 0.005). Recovery from COVID-19 and viral clearance may take a long time, especially in individuals who are hospitalised. To detect asymptomatic cases, screening programmes for healthcare workers is recommended.