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Healthcare workers don’t reliably test for respiratory viruses when they have symptoms, despite their risk for exposure to viruses on the job. From September 2024 to February 2025, 893 healthcare workers in Ireland completed surveys about respiratory symptoms and testing. As reported in Antimicrobial Stewardship & Healthcare Epidemiology, among 321 workers with symptoms, only 202 (63%) participants used self-administered antigen tests for COVID-19. Self-testing had a greater association with female sex, those with a preexisting risk factor for COVID-19, and those who recently had a prior infection. Of the 202 who tested, 17% had a positive result—equal to 4% of the total study population. The authors note the highest burden of symptomatic disease happened within 2 weeks of flu becoming the dominant respiratory viral pathogen in the general population, which “may provide a rationale to perform multiplex respiratory viral screening on [healthcare workers] during the winter periods to identify impending disease surges.”
Health workers opt out: The workers had access to the seasonal flu and SARS-CoV-2 booster vaccines in their workplace but uptake was variable, with 37% receiving flu vaccines and 22% receiving SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. What’s concerning is that 549 study participants received neither vaccine.