Previously submitted to: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (no longer under consideration since Mar 07, 2022)
Date Submitted: Nov 25, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Surveillance and epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 viral variants in the United States, May-October 2021
ABSTRACT
Background:
Genomic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 positive specimens has been critical in detecting and tracking variants of concern.
Methods:
We analyzed a recent cohort of SARS-CoV-2-positive specimens collected from patients in over 5,000 testing locations across the United States. These data were combined with an online pre-screening questionnaire on symptoms, exposures and vaccination status to examine epidemiological trends related to virulence, transmissibility, and vaccine effectiveness.
Results:
Between May and October 2021, 177,253 patient specimens were sequenced and approximately 400 different SARS-CoV-2 lineages identified. Within this cohort, 152,373 (86.0%) were aged 16 and older, and the percent of these patients that were fully vaccinated increased from 4.5% in May to 42.3% in October. Although positivity rates of fully vaccinated patients increased, unvaccinated patients were 30.4% (95% CI 26.5-34.3%) more likely to report shortness of breath and 34.0% (95% CI 32.1-35.9%) more likely to report fever, shaking, or chills.
Conclusions:
Our nationally representative database of patient-reported measures and lineage data from SARS-CoV-2 specimens provides useful data to track emerging trends and lineages of concern.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.