Additional exploratory analyses
COVID-19 infection
COVID-19 INFECTION
The COVID-19 pandemic may lead to heterogeneous effects, for example via changes to the study population, changes in medical practice intervention, or as a direct result of COVID-19 infection [We will investigate the overall quality of implementation and its clustering by site, with a focus on adherence as an indicator of clinician behaviour. We will classify clinicians by whether they adhere to the PCT-guided algorithm during least 90% of decisions, restricting the analysis to clinicians who have made a minimum number of decisions (this cut-off will be determined after inspection of the distribution of the number of decisions, whether adherent or not, taken per clinician). We will also explore how adherence changed over the course of the study and whether clinician choices were associated with the sex or ethnicity of the patient. Further exploratory implementation analysis may be added, based on the results of the qualitative process evaluation, which is described in the trial protocol [Any analysis that is not specified in the SAP will be clearly identified as post hoc analysis in the final report or subsequent publications.