COVID-19

Jeffrey Rose: “I think the desire to break apart some of the functionality of the hospital and spread it out into other facilities-like oncology centers or ambulatory surgery centers-to reduce the large population at one building, is going to continue to grow. And in addition, if you design them correctly, you can use those facilities for surge capacity.”

While starting to perform elective surgeries, hospitals should also keep an eye COVID-19 in their communities and have the resources available to respond to a surge in COVID patients without having to resort to a crisis standard of care.

Both donning and doffing are carefully laid out, but it’s the doffing part of the procedure that might present the most challenge because it involves the discarding of some of the PPE in a manner that most limits the chance of self-contamination or contaminating someone else. 

Daniel F. Shay, Esq.: “COVID-19 is not the last infectious disease that we’re going to encounter…. I think that there are good reasons to use telemedicine to the extent that you can reduce the risk to healthcare practitioners, healthcare professionals, and also to other patients, and, frankly, the general populace.”

Yi Guo, PharmD: “I think one thing that we learned is to work closely with the infection control preventionists because when we discovered the patient has multidrug resistant bacteria, we want to make sure the appropriate isolation policy is in place.”

Start out with brief non-urgent telemedicine encounters; get the patients used to the process.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to the Abbott ID Now test on March 27.

Brooke Decker, MD: "Keep in mind that right now you’re generating those stories that you’re going to be telling junior colleagues for decades to come."

For those working in healthcare, the relationship with the supply chain department was an increasingly important one. Between daily mask utilization and supply reporting to scrambling to find more supplies, those working in healthcare supply chains were working exceedingly hard to keep our heads above water. 

"We had to everyday kind of make some changes. Every morning there were huddles and we tried to figure it out."

The media, public health officials, and politicians are accused of being too quick to find fault with nursing home providers.

COVID-19 testing capabilities would have to increase by at least 211% in order for hospitals and other healthcare facilities to resume providing elective procedures and diagnostic services.

These pathogens are relentless, they are evolutionarily programed to win, and they are currently doing just that.

Just because we declare the economy open does not mean it will. It is treated as a switch, but it is not.

Investigators say that they identified 14 mutations that affect the spikes on SARS-CoV-2.

Brent James, MD: "As soon as you get a health plan involved, it’s all about the money. Turns out that when you reduce infection rates, nearly always that reduces the cost of health care. It takes an investment to make that happen, though. Quality is not free." 

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an emergency use authorization of the antiviral drug remdesivir for the treatment of patients with coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19).

"Operation Warp Speed" seeks to develop and disburse 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine to the public by year’s end.

We are forced to act on best evidence, but in some cases the evidence is less than actionable.

Lisa Brosseau, ScD: "What we’re seeing is a lot of magical thinking. A lot of wishful thinking. Cloth masks are wishful thinking."

Nicole York: "The dying process can take a long time, but I was with her while she was still alert. And I called up her family so that they could talk to her on the phone. But that’s all she got was just to talk to them on the phone."

Look to our own practices in hospitals. Are meetings occurring with lots of people for a prolonged period of time without PPE? Breakroom clusters of staff to eat? Exposure is not limited to the patient-caregiver interaction.

Kalia Murray, EMT: "We are the first ones to arrive on a scene, often having no idea what we're walking into."

As we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, it’s very important for infection control professionals to think, “How do we take this crisis and use it as a lever to cause the change that we care about so much?”

Deborah Birx, MD, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator: “Throughout the summer, when we do not have flu to contaminate the picture, we’ll be able to follow the syndromic pattern city by city, community by community, state by state."

The CDC’s recommendation of using a bandana as a last resort to stop the COVID-19 virus places our healthcare system at the level of a third-world country and underscores the severity of the current pandemic and erosion of our healthcare system’s infrastructure.