The challenge of COVID-19 for a Clinical Microbiology Department

Objectives: To quantify the workload and cost overload that the COVID-19 pandemic has meant for a Clinical Microbiology laboratory in a real-life scenario. Methods: We compared the number of samples received, their distribution, the human resources, and the budget of a Microbiology laboratory in the COVID pandemic (March–December 2020) with the same months of the previous year. Results: the total number of samples processed in the Clinical Microbiology laboratory in March to December 2020 increased 96.70% with respect to 2019 (from 246,060 to 483,993 samples), reflecting an increment of 127.50% when expressed as samples/1000 admissions (from 6057 to 13,780). The increase in workload was mainly at the expense of the virology (+2058%) and serology (+86%) areas. Despite additional personnel hiring, the samples processed per technician increased 12.5%. The extra cost attributed to Microbiology amounts to 6,616,511 euros (114.8%). Conclusions: This is the first study to provide quantitative figures about workload and cost increase caused by the COVID-19 in a Microbiology laboratory.