Outpatient surveillance programme for health workers with COVID 19 in Mexico: an observational study of ambulatory treatment and early hospitalization

INTRODUCTION: International guidelines recommend hospital care for patients with severe Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), but fragile health care systems struggle to cope with high number of admissions, placing patients at risk of receiving substandard care. We describe an outpatient ambulatory surveillance and treatment strategy (OPAT) for health care workers (HCWs) with severe COVID-19 during low hospital bed availability periods in Mexico City. METHODS: In this observational, descriptive, retrospective study, we included HCWs with severe disease for whom there were no hospital beds available at the time of evaluation. We provided daily assessments by infectious disease specialists, daily ambulatory steroid, oral thromboprophylaxis and domiciliary low-dose oxygen. We recorded the number of patients who recovered, were hospitalized or died on follow-up. RESULTS: From 18 March 2020 to 16 July 2021, 1739 HCWs attended our service. A total of 540 were diagnosed with COVID-19. Seventy-four had severe COVID-19 and needed hospitalization. Immediate hospitalization was not possible in 56 patients who were sent to the OPAT and included in our study. Twenty-four patients subsequently required hospitalization and 32 recovered as outpatients. CONCLUSIONS: We describe a feasible and safe outpatient management strategy for HCWs with severe COVID-19 in a low-resource setting.