Objective: We aimed to investigate sociodemographic factors associated with self-reported COVID-19 infection.
Methods: The study population was a prospective multicenter cohort of adult volunteers recruited from healthcare systems located in the mid-Atlantic and southern United States. Between April 2020 and October 2021, participants completed daily online questionnaires about symptoms, exposures, and risk behaviors related to COVID-19, including self-reports of positive SARS CoV-2 detection tests and COVID-19 vaccination. Analysis of time from study enrollment to self-reported COVID-19 infection used a time-varying mixed effects Cox-proportional hazards framework.
Results: Overall, 1,603 of 27,214 study participants (5.9%) reported a positive COVID-19 test during the study period. The adjusted hazard ratio demonstrated lower risk for women, those with a graduate level degree, and smokers. A higher risk was observed for healthcare workers, those aged 18-34, those in rural areas, those from households where a member attends school or interacts with the public, and those who visited a health provider in the last year.
Conclusions: We identified subgroups within healthcare network populations defined by age, occupational exposure, and rural location reporting higher than average rates of COVID-19 infection for our surveillance population. These subgroups should be monitored closely in future epidemics of respiratory viral diseases.
Copyright: © 2024 Beron et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.