Search

Background: Social and ecological differences in early SARS-CoV-2 pandemic screening and outcomes have been documented, but the means by which these differences have arisen are not well understood. Objective: To characterize socioeconomic and chronic disease-related mechanisms underlying these differences. Design: Observational cohort study. Setting: Outpatient and emergency care. Patients: 12900 Cleveland Clinic Health System patients referred for SARS-CoV-2 testing between March 17 and April 15, 2020. Interventions: Nasopharyngeal PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Measurements: Test location (emergency department, ED, vs. outpatient care), COVID-19 symptoms, test positivity and hospitalization among positive cases. Results: We identified six classes of symptoms, ranging in test positivity from 3.4% to 23%. Non-Hispanic Black race/ethnicity was disproportionately represented in the group with highest positivity rates. Non-Hispanic Black patients ranged from 1.81 [95% confidence interval: 0.91–3.59] times (at age 20) to 2.37 [1.54–3.65] times (at age 80) more likely to test positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus than non-Hispanic White patients, while test positivity was not significantly different across the neighborhood income spectrum. Testing in the emergency department (OR: 5.4 [3.9, 7.5]) and cardiovascular disease (OR: 2.5 [1.7, 3.8]) were related to increased risk of hospitalization among the 1247 patients who tested positive. Limitations: Constraints on availability of test kits forced providers to selectively test for SARS-Cov-2. Conclusion: Non-Hispanic Black patients and patients from low-income neighborhoods tended toward more severe and prolonged symptom profiles and increased comorbidity burden. These factors were associated with higher rates of testing in the ED. Non-Hispanic Black patients also had higher test positivity rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary scientific community places a growing emphasis on the reproducibility of research. The projects R package is a free, open-source package created in the interest of facilitating reproducible research workflows. It adds to existing software tools for reproducible research and introduces several practical features that are helpful for scientists and their collaborative research teams. For each individual project, it supplies a framework for storing raw and cleaned study data sets, and it provides script templates for protocol creation, data cleaning, data analysis and manuscript development. Internal databases of project and author information are generated and displayed, and manuscript title pages containing author lists and their affiliations are automatically generated from the internal database. File management tools allow teams to organize multiple projects. When used on a shared file system, multiple researchers can harmoniously contribute to the same project in a less punctuated manner, reducing the frequency of misunderstandings and the need for status updates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]