Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 May 20:770:145225.
doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145225. Epub 2021 Jan 17.

High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection among food delivery riders. A case study from Quito, Ecuador

Esteban Ortiz-Prado  1 , Aquiles R Henriquez-Trujillo  2 , Ismar A Rivera-Olivero  2 , Tannya Lozada  2 , Miguel Angel Garcia-Bereguiain  3 ; UDLA-COVID-19 team  2
Affiliations

High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection among food delivery riders. A case study from Quito, Ecuador

Esteban Ortiz-Prado et al. Sci Total Environ. .

Abstract

Aim: COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented pressure on health systems and economies worldwide. Delivery services have grown as an alternative source of revenue for many people. Consumers generally perceive that delivery services are safer than going into a restaurant, because they reduce exposure to other people and their risk of SARS-CoV-2 contagion. There are no studies analyzing viral load or the burden of COID-19 within this population. This study aims to describe the presence of SARS-CoV-2 among food delivery riders in the city of Quito, Ecuador.

Study design: From July and August 2020, bike and motorbike riders self-employed in two of the main online delivery services in Quito, Ecuador, were invited for RT-PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 detection during the compulsory lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) RT-qPCR Diagnostic Panel was used to identify the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in nasopharyngeal swabs. All samples were processed in the BSL2 certified molecular biology laboratory at Universidad de Las Americas.

Results: A total of 22 out of 145 delivery workers (15.2%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. The majority of workers were men (n = 138), the average age of male workers was 32 years-old (±7.3) and 38 years-old (± 10.6) for females. The presence of mild symptoms was reported in only 9 subjects (6%). The calculated viral load was higher among males with 1.31E+08 copies/mL vs 2.30E+06 in females, although this difference was not statistically significant (p value: 0.68, [CI: -53 to -79]).

Conclusions: The self-employed food delivery riders have a high incidence rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection in relation to the national average. It is important to point out that this is the first study of its kind in Latin-American and probably one of the very few in the world. The results emphasize the need for policy makers to look at the pandemic from as many population's sub-groups as possible. Delivery riders are a highly moving population that offer their services to a wide range of clients, including vulnerable populations such as the elderly or those less likely to leave their house for basic needs stoking.

Keywords: COVID-19; Food delivery; Riders; SARS-CoV-2.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Unlabelled Image
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Age and sex distribution of SARS-CoV-2 test positivity among the 145 food delivery riders included on the study.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Viral load of SARS-CoV-2 through RT-qPCR for 22 positive food delivery riders.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Apouey B., Roulet A., Solal I., Stabile M. Gig workers during the COVID-19 crisis in France: financial precarity and mental well-being. J. Urban Health. 2020:1–20. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bashir M.F., Bilal B.M., Komal B. Correlation between environmental pollution indicators and COVID-19 pandemic: a brief study in Californian context. Environ. Res. 2020;109652 doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.109652. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. CDC What Food and Grocery Pick-Up and Delivery Drivers Need to Know about COVID-19 [Internet]. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/organizations/food-g... [cited 2020 Sep 27]. Available from.
    1. Chang H.-H., Meyerhoefer C. 2020. COVID-19 and the Demand for Online Food Shopping Services: Empirical Evidence from Taiwan. National Bureau of Economic Research.
    1. Clarín.com Coronavirus en India: un repartidor de pizza dio positivo y debieron aislar a 72 familias [Internet]. Clarin Internacional. 2020. https://www.clarin.com/internacional/coronavirus-india-repartidor-pizza-... [cited 2020 Sep 12]. Available from: