Publications by authors named "Sarah Bartsch"

Background: Long COVID, which affects an estimated 44.69-48.04 million people in the U.

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  • * In 2019, approximately 236.6 million people required treatment for schistosomiasis, highlighting its significant impact on fishing and agricultural communities.
  • * The Vaccine Value Profile (VVP) is a comprehensive assessment created by a group of experts to evaluate the public health and economic potential of new vaccines targeting schistosomiasis, emphasizing the need to address existing research gaps.
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  • Persistent sex disparities in physical activity and sports participation among US children and adolescents could benefit from interventions aimed at reducing these gaps.
  • A simulation study modeled the potential lifetime impacts of increasing female participants' activity levels to match male levels, examining health and economic outcomes based on the agent-based model of 8,299,353 children aged 6 to 17 in 2023.
  • Results indicated that eliminating these disparities could prevent over 28,000 cases of overweight and obesity by age 18, potentially saving approximately $780 million in combined medical costs and productivity losses over the lifetimes of the affected cohorts.
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Importance: Current guidance to furlough health care staff with mild COVID-19 illness may prevent the spread of COVID-19 but may worsen nursing home staffing shortages as well as health outcomes that are unrelated to COVID-19.

Objective: To compare COVID-19-related with non-COVID-19-related harms associated with allowing staff who are mildly ill with COVID-19 to work while masked.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This modeling study, conducted from November 2023 to June 2024, used an agent-based model representing a 100-bed nursing home and its residents, staff, and their interactions; care tasks; and resident and staff health outcomes to simulate the impact of different COVID-19 furlough policies over 1 postpandemic year.

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Over the past sixty years, scientists have been warning about climate change and its impacts on human health, but evidence suggests that many may not be heeding these concerns. This raises the question of whether new communication approaches are needed to overcome the unique challenges of communicating what people can do to slow or reverse climate change. To better elucidate the challenges of communicating about the links between human activity, climate change and its effects, and identify potential solutions, we developed a systems map of the factors and processes involved based on systems mapping sessions with climate change and communication experts.

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Society is at an inflection point-both in terms of climate change and the amount of data and computational resources currently available. Climate change has been a catastrophe in slow motion with relationships between human activity, climate change, and the resulting effects forming a complex system. However, to date, there has been a general lack of urgent responses from leaders and the general public, despite urgent warnings from the scientific community about the consequences of climate change and what can be done to mitigate it.

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  • With COVID-19 vaccinations becoming optional for many organizations, individuals now have the choice to receive new booster shots or updated vaccines.
  • A Markov model was created to analyze the clinical and economic outcomes for individuals in the U.S. regarding annual COVID-19 vaccinations versus not getting vaccinated.
  • For individuals aged 18-49, getting vaccinated could save up to $603 if uninsured, while those aged 50-64 could save even more, with both groups benefiting from vaccination under certain conditions of infection risk and vaccine efficacy.
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Background: With efforts underway to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine, otherwise known as a pan-coronavirus vaccine, this is the time to offer potential funders, researchers, and manufacturers guidance on the potential value of such a vaccine and how this value may change with differing vaccine and vaccination characteristics.

Methods: Using a computational model representing the United States (U.S.

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Importance: There are considerable socioeconomic status (SES) disparities in youth physical activity (PA) levels. For example, studies show that lower-SES youth are less active, have lower participation in organized sports and physical education classes, and have more limited access to PA equipment.

Objective: To determine the potential public health and economic effects of eliminating disparities in PA levels among US youth SES groups.

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Objectives: To evaluate the epidemiologic, clinical, and economic value of an annual nursing home (NH) COVID-19 vaccine campaign and the impact of when vaccination starts.

Design: Agent-based model representing a typical NH.

Setting And Participants: NH residents and staff.

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Introduction: Healthy People 2030, a U.S. government health initiative, has indicated that increasing youth sports participation to 63.

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Objective: Nursing home residents may be particularly vulnerable to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Therefore, a question is when and how often nursing homes should test staff for COVID-19 and how this may change as severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) evolves.

Design: We developed an agent-based model representing a typical nursing home, COVID-19 spread, and its health and economic outcomes to determine the clinical and economic value of various screening and isolation strategies and how it may change under various circumstances.

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A major challenge in communicating health-related information is the involvement of multiple complex systems from the creation of the information to the sources and channels of dispersion to the information users themselves. To date, public health communications approaches have often not adequately accounted for the complexities of these systems to the degree necessary to have maximum impact. The virality of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation has brought to light the need to consider these system complexities more extensively.

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Background: The increasing prevalence of smartphone apps to help people find different services raises the question of whether apps to help people find physical activity (PA) locations would help better prevent and control having overweight or obesity.

Objective: The aim of this paper is to determine and quantify the potential impact of a digital health intervention for African American women prior to allocating financial resources toward implementation.

Methods: We developed our Virtual Population Obesity Prevention, agent-based model of Washington, DC, to simulate the impact of a place-tailored digital health app that provides information about free recreation center classes on PA, BMI, and overweight and obesity prevalence among African American women.

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  • Many schools are cutting physical education (PE) classes due to budget issues, raising the question of whether they should be mandatory to combat rising obesity rates among youth.
  • A study using a model of youth in Mexico City found that offering PE classes, even if they don't meet guidelines, can lead to a decrease in obesity rates and is cost-effective over time.
  • If all schools offered PE that met international guidelines, there would be even greater reductions in obesity and related health conditions, potentially saving millions in medical costs while being cost-effective even at higher overall expenses.
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Background: Face mask wearing has been an important part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As vaccination coverage progresses in countries, relaxation of such practices is increasing. Subsequent COVID-19 surges have raised the questions of whether face masks should be encouraged or required and for how long.

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Importance: Multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) can spread across health care facilities in a region. Because of limited resources, certain interventions can be implemented in only some facilities; thus, decision-makers need to evaluate which interventions may be best to implement.

Objective: To identify a group of target facilities and assess which MDRO intervention would be best to implement in the Shared Healthcare Intervention to Eliminate Life-threatening Dissemination of MDROs in Orange County, a large regional public health collaborative in Orange County, California.

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Introduction: Economic evidence on how much it may cost for vaccinators to reach populations is important to plan vaccination programs. Moreover, knowing the incremental costs to reach populations that have traditionally been undervaccinated, especially those hard-to-reach who are facing supply-side barriers to vaccination, is essential to expanding immunization coverage to these populations.

Methods: We conducted a systematic review to identify estimates of costs associated with getting vaccinators to all vaccination sites.

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Introduction: Understanding the costs to increase vaccination demand among under-vaccinated populations, as well as costs incurred by beneficiaries and caregivers for reaching vaccination sites, is essential to improving vaccination coverage. However, there have not been systematic analyses documenting such costs for beneficiaries and caregivers seeking vaccination.

Methods: We searched PubMed, Scopus, and the Immunization Delivery Cost Catalogue (IDCC) in 2019 for the costs for beneficiaries and caregivers to 1) seek and know how to access vaccination (i.

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Introduction: Single-dose rotavirus vaccines, which are used by a majority of countries, are some of the largest-sized vaccines in immunization programs, and have been shown to constrain supply chains and cause bottlenecks. Efforts have been made to reduce the size of the single-dose vaccines; however, with two-dose, five-dose and ten-dose options available, the question then is whether using multi-dose instead of single-dose rotavirus vaccines will improve vaccine availability.

Methods: We used HERMES-generated simulation models of the vaccine supply chains of the Republic of Benin, Mozambique, and Bihar, a state in India, to evaluate the operational and economic impact of implementing each of the nine different rotavirus vaccine presentations.

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Background: Understanding the economics of vaccination is essential to developing immunization strategies that can be employed successfully with limited resources, especially when vaccinating populations that are hard-to-reach.

Methods: Based on the input from interviews with 24 global experts on immunization economics, we developed a systems map of the mechanisms (i.e.

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Background: With multiple coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines available, understanding the epidemiologic, clinical, and economic value of increasing coverage levels and expediting vaccination is important.

Methods: We developed a computational model (transmission and age-stratified clinical and economics outcome model) representing the United States population, COVID-19 coronavirus spread (February 2020-December 2022), and vaccination to determine the impact of increasing coverage and expediting time to achieve coverage.

Results: When achieving a given vaccination coverage in 270 days (70% vaccine efficacy), every 1% increase in coverage can avert an average of 876 800 (217 000-2 398 000) cases, varying with the number of people already vaccinated.

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