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When We Can Stop Pre-Procedure Screening For COVID-19

January 23, 2021 9:00 am

Briefly noted: S Sultan, SM Siddique et al. Gastroenterol 2020; 159: 1935-1948. Full text: AGA Institute Rapid Review and Recommendations on the Role of Pre-Procedure SARS-CoV-2 Testing and Endoscopy

Table 1 provides a summary of the recommendations and indicates a threshold for which routine pre-procedure testing may not be needed:

“For endoscopy centers where the prevalence of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection is low (<0.5%), the AGA suggests against implementing a pretesting strategy.”
Conditional recommendation, very low certainty evidence
Rationale: “In low-prevalence settings, a pretesting strategy may not be informative for triage due to the high number of false positives, thus PPE availability may drive decision-making.”

My take: Particularly after the rollout of vaccination to health care providers, routine testing for SARS-CoV-2 is not likely to be needed once the prevalence drops to low levels.

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