Background: Poor patient progression from the progressive care unit (PCU) beds has been recognized as a bottleneck, limiting the hospital's ability to optimize capacity for the sickest patients. Improving nurse management on PCU admission and discharge criteria could avoid PCU bottlenecks.
Local Problem: Our institution lacked a standard process to identify clinically appropriate patients ready for transfer out of the PCU, causing delays in vacating PCU beds.
Eradication of COVID-19 is out of reach. Are we close to a "new normal" in which people can leave behind restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) yet face a tolerable burden of disease? The answer depends on the ongoing risks versus communities' tolerance for those risks. Using a detailed model of the COVID-19 pandemic spanning 93 countries, we estimate the biological and behavioral factors determining the risks and responses, and project the likely course of COVID-19.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEffective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic require integrating behavioral factors such as risk-driven contact reduction, improved treatment, and adherence fatigue with asymptomatic transmission, disease acuity, and hospital capacity. We build one such model and estimate it for all 92 nations with reliable testing data. Cumulative cases and deaths through 22 December 2020 are estimated to be 7.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolicies to promote public health and welfare often fail or worsen the problems they are intended to solve. Evidence-based learning should prevent such policy resistance, but learning in complex systems is often weak and slow. Complexity hinders our ability to discover the delayed and distal impacts of interventions, generating unintended "side effects.
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