The risk of a health professional catching COVID-19 while performing an endoscopy appears to be fairly low and the risk to patients is even lower, Italian doctors report.

As the pandemic swept through northern Italy, the Italian GI COVID-19 Working Group conducted a web-based survey of the directors of 41 hospital endoscopy units employing 968 healthcare staff, of whom 323 were doctors.

In total, 42 staff cases were reported to have occurred during the outbreak up to the time of the survey in mid-March, amounting to 4.3%, and considerably lower than the healthcare worker infection rate of 10% reported by the Italian Ministry of Health.

Some 23 of the cases were doctors, 16 were nurses and three were healthcare assistants, the authors reported in Gut.