Abstract
The epidemiological situation in Canadian long term care homes over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a national emergency. Long term care home residents are a vulnerable population and the personnel surrounding them are considered high-risk. Current efforts seek to better characterize and understand the LTC context. This paper presents preliminary results from the Ontario participants of an ongoing multi-province cohort study examining the humoral, sociodemographic, and health-related risk factors of infection, re-infection, or serious outcomes following exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
Subjects received an online questionnaire administered through the platform SurveyMonkey.
The purpose of this project is to report the findings of this baseline risk profile using descriptive and exploratory analyses. Sociodemographic characteristics of residents, healthcare workers, and caregivers were analyzed, highlighting key differences within these subgroups. For instance, residents were on average older and had more underlying chronic health issues. Healthcare workers tended to be younger, more ethnically diverse as well as, had a higher level of both education and immigration compared to caregivers and residents.
This paper also presents important determinants of health stratified by self-reported COVID-19 infection history, including flu vaccination status as a risk factor for previous SARS-CoV-2 infection. This descriptive analysis includes health and wellbeing ratings, for which mental health ratings were found to vary significantly with time. Lastly, access to healthcare among workers and caregivers was measured, finding a noteworthy proportion of respondents needing care, but unable to access it during the previous 12 months (14.8%). Altogether, this paper outlines the epidemiological description of Ontario participants at baseline in a large LTC cohort.