Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

9 INFECTION CONTROL COVID-19 testing not crucial for every surgical patient, anesthesiologists say By Mackenzie Bean P erioperative COVID-19 testing is no longer recommended for every patient undergoing nonemergent surgery in hospitals and other healthcare facilities, according to a guidance from the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation. The guidance, updated June 15, encourages healthcare facilities in areas with low to moderate community spread to consider "a more permissive approach" to testing if the patient is asymptomatic, fully vaccinated and having a lower-risk procedure. ASA and APSF previously recommended COVID-19 testing for all patients undergoing surgery, regardless of vaccination status. Facilities in areas with high COVID-19 transmission should continue testing every patient before surgery. n How omicron changed the reinfection landscape By Erica Carbajal C OVID-19 reinfections have seemingly become common since omicron and its sublineages took hold, The New York Times reported June 11. In today's COVID-19 landscape, it's no longer peculiar to hear of someone who has been infected two or three times. Pre-omicron, however, reinfections weren't commonplace. A team of scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar estimated that infection with delta or an earlier virus strain was 90 percent effective at preventing reinfection in both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. "But omicron really changed that calculus," Laith Abu- Raddad, PhD, an infectious disease epidemiologist who led the research, told the Times. After omicron's emergence, prior infections provided just 50 percent protection against subsequent infections. Research has also suggested people who are older or immunocompromised are more vulnerable to reinfection, since they make too few or poor- quality antibodies. The good news, however, is that none of the more than 1,300 reinfections Dr. Abu-Raddad and team have tracked from the start of the pandemic through May 2021 have led to hospitalization in an intensive care unit or death. Experts have echoed the message that the primary purpose of vaccines at this point in the pandemic is to prevent severe illness and that the virus is evolving to behave more like its relative viruses that cause common colds. "I've thought, almost since the beginning of this pandemic, that COVID-19 is eventually going to become an inevitable infection that everybody gets multiple times, because that's just how a new respiratory virus gets established in the human population," Amesh Adalja, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University, told the Times. n As COVID-19 restrictions loosen, diseases rebound in atypical ways By Mackenzie Bean N umerous viruses that were seemingly dormant during the pandemic are returning in new and atypical ways, CNBC reported June 10. Flu, respiratory syncytial virus, adenovirus, tuberculosis and mon- keypox are among the viruses that have recently surged or exhibited unusual behaviors. e U.S. saw extremely mild flu seasons in 2020-21 and 2021-22, likely due to high rates of mask-wearing, social distancing and other COVID-19 prevention measures. However, flu cases started to rise this February and continued to climb through the spring as more public health measures receded. "We've never seen a flu season in the U.S. extend into June," Scott Roberts, MD, associate medical director for infection prevention at Yale New Haven (Conn.) Hospital, told CNBC. "COVID has clearly had a very big impact on that. Now that people have unmasked [and] places are opening up, we're seeing viruses behave in very odd ways that they weren't before." Washington state is also reporting its most severe tuberculosis outbreak in 20 years, while monkeypox is spreading worldwide. ese viruses, suppressed during the pandemic, now have more op- portunities to spread as people resume daily life, become more social and travel more. Society, as a whole, also has less immunity against the viruses aer two years of reduced exposure to them, according to the report. e pandemic has also boosted surveillance efforts and public inter- est in other outbreaks, experts say. "COVID has raised the profile of public health matters so that we are perhaps paying more attention to these events when they occur," Jennifer Horney, PhD, professor of epidemiology at the University of Delaware in Newark, told CNBC. n

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