Floor swabs at LTC homes early predictor of COVID outbreaks, study finds – CBC

Tool could help prevent future outbreaks or make them less harmful, say researchers

Mar 15, 2023

After swabbing the floors of several Ontario long-term care homes for more than a year, scientists say sampling floors for the COVID-19 virus can help detect an outbreak days before it happens.

“It’s exciting because up until now, we really haven’t had a great way of being able to predict when an outbreak might happen within a long-term care home,” said Mike Fralick, a clinician scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and the lead author of the study published in February in NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) Evidence.

Long-term care (LTC) homes across the country were devastated by the pandemic and outbreaks continue to happen in Ottawa facilities.

According to Ottawa Public Health, outbreaks at the city’s long-term care homes were the deadliest among its tracked institutional settings, with a total of 397 patient and staff deaths reported since 2020.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/long-term-care-home-floor-swab-predict-outbreak-1.6769836