Bacteremia and Blood Culture Utilization during COVID-19 Surge in New York City.

ABSTRACT: A surge of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presenting to New York City hospitals in March 2020 led to a sharp increase in blood culture utilization, which overwhelmed the capacity of automated blood culture instruments. We sought to evaluate the utilization and diagnostic yield of blood cultures during the COVID-19 pandemic to determine prevalence and common etiologies of bacteremia and to inform a diagnostic approach to relieve blood culture overutilization. We performed a retrospective cohort analysis of 88,201 blood cultures from 28,011 patients at a multicenter network of hospitals within New York City to evaluate order volume, positivity rate, time to positivity, and etiologies of positive cultures in COVID-19. Ordering volume increased by 34.8% in the second half of March 2020 compared to the level in the first half of the month. The rate of bacteremia was significantly lower among COVID-19 patients (3.8%) than among COVID-19-negative patients (8.0%) and those not tested (7.1%) (P?

SUBMITTER: Sepulveda J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7383550 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature