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Even with effective screening, treatment, and education, STIs can be like movie villains who just won’t die, who change form, and who keep coming back to wreak havoc. They’re relentless, but so is science.

Linda S. Estep, BS MT (ASCP), CIC: “I’ve done many hand hygiene audits in my day, I still do hand hygiene audits, when I’m in the hospitals now. If they know who you are, they scatter. They know the infection preventionists.”

There needs to be a shift from droplet precaution standards to airborne spread standards and we need to invest in the safety of our frontline workers.

The decision by Texas and other states to reopen seems to disregard the threat posed by COVID-19 variants, opponents of the move argue.

Infection prevention isn’t unique to health care, but rather representative of a bigger role within the community – it’s where health care and public health meet.

This may not be the best time to ask, “What’s next?” But…what’s next? What pathogen(s) not called COVID-19 should we be most concerned about? And where will it (they) be coming from?

Linda Spaulding RN, BC, CIC, CHEC, CHOP: “There have been 3,104,010 cases of COVID-19 among kids between the ages of zero and 20…. That means that 13.1% of all the cases of COVID-19 that we’ve seen in the US have been children.”

Twenty-six percent of people who are taking a wait-and-see approach about whether to get the COVID-19 vaccine say that they’d be more likely to get vaccinated if it involved just a single dose.

As more people become vaccinated, we will be navigating the aspects of a partially vaccinated public. This will be especially challenging as we learn more about prevention of infection and not just severe disease.

Janssen Ad26.COV2.S is an intramuscular injection vaccine consisting of a replication-incompetent recombinant adenovirus type 26 (Ad26) vector which expresses the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein.

An FDA ruling this week quickens the process by which COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers can get to the market—and into arms—booster shots that are targeted at variants.

Daniel Burnett, MD, MBA: “The aerosols, the things that are the true danger and that can hang in the air for hours, depending on their size, are still released around the edges and around the nose of cloth masks. A cloth mask does very little to protect you.”

How will the COVID vaccine be handled at each facility? Wil it be mandatory? Will it be given annually? Will it be a condition of employment? These are all questions that will need to be addressed.

An “exponential” outbreak of COVID-19 occurred among health care workers most likely because they let their guard down during social interaction with colleagues.

Infection preventionists can coordinate with physicians and other subject matter experts on common areas of vaccine hesitancy among staff, and work with key stakeholders to address them.

As all resources and attention were focused on COVID-19 for the past year, many other infectious diseases were neglected. Here’s what we need to monitor.

In its push to get as many Americans vaccinated as soon as possible, the government is also pushing to get as many people qualified to administer the COVID-19 vaccinations as soon as possible.

A group of scientists and physicians charge that the CDC’s current guidance on masking might not be enough to meet the threat of COVID-19 variants.

Rebecca Leach, RN, BSN, MPH, CIC: “The flu vaccine is mandated where I work. I do see a day where the COVID-19 vaccine will be mandated as well in health care facilities especially if—as we expect—COVID is not going away.”

In response to COVID-19, companies manufacture robots that would complement the cleaning and disinfection work done by environmental services teams in hospitals. Might the machines also one day take their jobs?

As infection and hospitalization rates from COVID-19 plummet across America, medical experts worry about the variants and vaccine hesitancy.

Frequent, (three times a week) screening of our athletes has been key to the opening of professional sports. Our students deserve the same safety precautions as professional athletes.

Kevin Kavanagh, MD: “Throughout the history of evolution, and even through the history of mankind, you’ve seen species get wiped out. You’ve seen civilizations of man fall because of infections. And the thing that differentiates us from a tadpole is our science and our knowledge. And if we don’t take advantage of that….”

The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) argues that nursing homes in New York should have a fulltime IP on staff.

The CDC encourages double-masking if it’s done correctly, meaning with a tight fit. The agency updated the guidance with an eye on worrisome new COVID variants.

We need to have mandatory reporting of worker and patient acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 and the development of COVID-19 with metrics to provide us the most accurate estimate of cases so we can effectively plan and allocate resources.

Linda Spaulding RN, BC, CIC, CHEC, CHOP: “Now the new challenge is going to be will we get definitive answers that the COVID tests that we’re currently doing will pick this variant up?”

Hospitalizations for COVID-19 dropped by a statistically significant 5.5 percentage points for adults from 18 to 64, compared to the hospitalization rates in the 4 weeks preceding the implementation of the mask mandates.