Pandemic Responsiveness in an Acute Care Setting: A Community Hospital's Utilization of Operational Resources During COVID-19.

Background: To ensure continuity of services while mitigating patient surge and nosocomial infections during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, acute care hospitals have been required to make significant operational adjustments. Here, we identify and discuss key administrative priorities and strategies utilized by a large community hospital located in Ontario, Canada.

Methods: Guided by a qualitative descriptive approach, we performed a thematic analysis of all COVID-19-related documentation discussed by the hospital's emergency operation centre (EOC) during the pandemic's first wave.

St. Louis Encephalitis Virus in the Southwestern United States: A Phylogeographic Case for a Multi-Variant Introduction Event.

Since the reemergence of St. Louis Encephalitis (SLE) Virus (SLEV) in the Southwest United States, identified during the 2015 outbreak in Arizona, SLEV has been seasonally detected within spp. populations throughout the Southwest United States.

Characterization of neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome in Arizona from 2010-2017.

In this paper, we describe a population of mothers who are opioid dependent at the time of giving birth and neonates exposed to opioids in utero who experience withdrawal following birth. While there have been studies of national trends in this population, there remains a gap in studies of regional trends. Using data from the Arizona Department of Health Services Hospital Discharge Database, this study aimed to characterize the population of neonates with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) and mothers who were opioid dependent at the time of giving birth, in Arizona.

Sample pooling methods for efficient pathogen screening: Practical implications.

Due to the large number of negative tests, individually screening large populations for rare pathogens can be wasteful and expensive. Sample pooling methods improve the efficiency of large-scale pathogen screening campaigns by reducing the number of tests and reagents required to accurately categorize positive and negative individuals. Such methods rely on group testing theory which mainly focuses on minimizing the total number of tests; however, many other practical concerns and tradeoffs must be considered when choosing an appropriate method for a given set of circumstances.

Selective whole genome amplification and sequencing of Coxiella burnetii directly from environmental samples.

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is a widely available, inexpensive means of providing a wealth of information about an organism's diversity and evolution. However, WGS for many pathogenic bacteria remain limited because they are difficult, slow and/or dangerous to culture. To avoid culturing, metagenomic sequencing can be performed directly on samples, but the sequencing effort required to characterize low frequency organisms can be expensive.