Franklin Dexter1, Richard H Epstein2. 1. University of Iowa, United States of America. Electronic address: Franklin-Dexter@UIowa.edu. 2. University of Miami, United States of America.
We recently published a narrative review of operating room management about planning ambulatory surgery for asymptomatic patients tested for COVID-19 [1]. From page 3 column 2, “SARS-CoV-2 is detected on plastic and stainless steel surfaces (e.g., in the phase I post-anesthesia care unit) for 4 days [48]. The University of Iowa's ambulatory surgery center has 12 operating rooms. Based on 4 cases per day per room and 50% of cases being general anesthetics, approximately 41% of 4-day periods would be expected to have at least one exposure event.” [1] That sentence references footnote 1. The last sentence of the footnote was written “false positive” rather than the intended “false negative.” [1] In addition, we correctly calculated the 41% probability of at least one false negative test. However, we wrote in the formula 0.9945 to the 120th power. We actually used the 96th power, as intended. Multiplying 12 rooms × 4 cases per day × 50% × 4 days = 96 cases.
Funding
None.
CRediT author statement
Dr. Dexter helped with conceptualization, methodology, writing the original draft, and reviewing and editing. Dr. Epstein helped with conceptualization and reviewing and editing.
Authors: Franklin Dexter; Mohamed Elhakim; Randy W Loftus; Melinda S Seering; Richard H Epstein Journal: J Clin Anesth Date: 2020-04-29 Impact factor: 9.452