National arthroplasty registers however only capture infections that are reoperated (and in some registries only the revised ones) and not the infections treated by antibiotics only [ 13– 15].
If studies were explicit in describing the methods by which they captured infection, nonreporting of infection within the results was assumed to represent no infections in either group.
This definition would include a higher proportion of definite infections but would miss a large number of genuine infections in which either the single billing code did not capture the infection or anti-infectives were appropriately not prescribed.
Extensions to the basic birth death model, such as the birth death skyline (Stadler et al., 2013), which involves fitting a piecewise constant birth death process, may help to capture varying infection rates.
Our work focused on sepsis with organ dysfunction, and therefore is likely to fail to capture either infection without new organ dysfunction or new sepsis with established organ dysfunction.
Moreover, passive surveillance systems do not capture asymptomatic infections, which contribute to disease transmission in the community during the viremic stage of illness.
We recommend post-treatment tests for re-infection at both genital and rectal sites, as this will of course capture re-infection regardless of its source.
