Articles: pandemics.
-
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people experiencing homelessness in multiple ways. The Everyone In initiative during 2020 was initially transformative in providing short-term accommodation for this group but was accompanied by major disruptions to treatment and support services. Understanding how these changes have affected health needs of people experiencing homelessness in the inner-city London Borough of Tower Hamlets can inform future service commissioning. ⋯ None.
-
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a dramatic increase in acutely ill patients presenting to hospitals with life-threatening acute respiratory disease. There was an immediate need for effective triage systems to facilitate clinical decision making. This review assesses the performance of the National Early Warning Score 2 (NEWS2) in two contexts. ⋯ A NEWS2 of 5 had high short-term sensitivity within and was unlikely to miss patients with COVID-19 who go on to deteriorate, but this comes with moderate specificity. However, the specificity of these systems is likely underestimated because preventing deterioration is their purpose. NEWS2 is an adjunct to clinical decision making and has served that purpose during the COVID-19 pandemic, playing an important role in communicating illness severity, clinical deterioration, triaging patients to appropriate levels of care and prompting completion of treatment escalation plans for those with high scores and at imminent risk of deterioration.
-
Understanding educational patterns in excess mortality during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may help to identify strategies to reduce disparities. It is unclear whether educational inequalities in COVID-19 mortality have persisted throughout the pandemic, spanned the full range of educational attainment, or varied by other demographic indicators of COVID-19 risks, such as age or occupation. ⋯ Pervasive educational inequalities in excess mortality during the pandemic suggest multiple potential intervention points to reduce disparities.