Articles: coronavirus.
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During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare professionals are at the forefront of managing the highly infectious coronavirus. As the most common route of transmission is via aerosols and droplet inhalation, it is critical for healthcare workers to have the correct personal protective equipment (PPE) including gowns, masks and goggles. Surgical masks are not effective in preventing the influenza and SARS, so they are unlikely to be able to resist contaminated aerosols from entering the respiratory system. ⋯ Various types of respirators are used in healthcare settings, such as half-mask filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) and powered air-purifying respirators (PAPRs). The most commonly used FFR is the N95 disposable respirator, which is tight fitting and has a 95% or above particle filtering efficiency for a median particle size of 0.3 µm. This review discusses respirators, their purpose, types, clinical efficiency and proper donning and doffing techniques.
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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by novel enveloped single stranded RNA coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), is responsible for an ongoing global pandemic. While other countries deployed widespread testing as an early mitigation strategy, the U. S. experienced delays in development and deployment of organism identification assays. ⋯ Key messagesDelayed testing deployment has led to uncertainty surrounding overall disease burden and community spread, severely hampering public health containment and healthcare system preparation efforts. A multi-tiered testing strategy incorporating rapid, host immune point-of-care tests can be used now and for future pandemic planning by effectively identifying patients at risk of disease thereby facilitating quarantine earlier in the progression of the outbreak during the weeks and months it can take for pathogen specific confirmatory tests to be developed, validated and manufactured in sufficient quantities. The ability to triage patients at the point of care and support the guidance of medical and therapeutic decisions, for viral isolation or confirmatory testing or for appropriate treatment of COVID-19 and/or bacterial infections, is a critical component to our national pandemic response and there is an urgent need to implement the proposed strategy to combat the current outbreak.
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Confronted with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, New York City Health + Hospitals, the city's public health care system, rapidly expanded capacity across its eleven acute care hospitals and three new field hospitals. To meet the unprecedented demand for patient care, NYC Health + Hospitals redeployed staff to the areas of greatest need and redesigned recruiting, onboarding, and training processes. ⋯ Using new educational tools focused on COVID-19 content, the hospital system trained twenty thousand staff members, including nearly nine thousand nurses, within a two-month period. Creation of multidisciplinary teams, frequent enterprisewide communication, willingness to shift direction in response to changing needs, and innovative use of technology were the key factors that enabled the hospital system to meet its goals.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic developed, reports of neurological dysfunctions spanning the central and peripheral nervous systems have emerged. The spectrum of acute neurological dysfunctions may implicate direct viral invasion, para-infectious complications, neurological manifestations of systemic diseases, or co-incident neurological dysfunction in the context of high SARS-CoV-2 prevalence. A rapid and pragmatic approach to understanding the prevalence, phenotypes, pathophysiology and prognostic implications of COVID-19 neurological syndromes is urgently needed. ⋯ This is one of the first large-scale global research collaboratives urgently assembled to evaluate acute neurological events in the context of a pandemic. The innovative and pragmatic tiered study approach has allowed for rapid recruitment and activation of numerous sites across the world-an approach essential to capture real-time critical neurological data to inform treatment strategies in this pandemic crisis.