Regular booster vaccination programmes help protect the most vulnerable from COVID-19 and limit pressure on health systems. Existing studies find booster doses to be effective in preventing hospital admissions and deaths but focus on individual effects, failing to consider the population impact of incomplete vaccination coverage and seasonal patterns in disease transmission. We estimated the effectiveness of the 2022 spring booster vaccination programme, available for those aged 75 years and older, residents in care homes, and adults with weakened immune systems, on COVID-19 hospital bed occupancy in England.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Joint External Evaluation (JEE) assesses national capacities to implement the International Health Regulations (IHR). Previous studies have found that higher JEE scores are associated with fewer communicable disease deaths. But given the impact of COVID-19 in many countries, including those believed to have developed IHR capacities, the validity of the JEE for pandemic preparedness has been questioned.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic and associated non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have affected all countries. With a scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines there has been a need to prioritize populations, but assessing relative needs has been challenging. The COVAX Facility allocates vaccines to cover 20% of each national population, followed by a needs assessment that considers five quantitative metrics alongside a qualitative assessment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Public Health
July 2022
Disease control is important to limit the social, economic and health effects of COVID-19 and reduce the risk of novel variants emerging. Evidence suggests vaccines are less effective against the Omicron variant, but their impact on disease control is unclear. We used a longitudinal fixed effects Poisson regression model to assess the impact of vaccination on COVID-19 case rates across 32 countries in Europe from 13th October to 01st January 2022.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmergency health kits are a vital way of providing essential medicines and supplies to health clinics during humanitarian crises. The WHO non-communicable diseases (NDCs) kit was developed 5 years ago, recognising the increasing challenge of providing continuity of care and secondary prevention of NCDs and exacerbations, in such settings. Monitoring and evaluation of emergency health kits is an important process to ensure the contents are fit for purpose and to assess usability and utility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Epidemiol Community Health
June 2022
Background: Excess mortality has been used to assess the overall health impact of COVID-19 across countries. Democracies aim to build trust in government and enable checks and balances on decision making, which may be useful in a pandemic. But during the pandemic, they have been criticised as being hesitant to enforce restrictive public health measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Several countries paused their rollouts of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) vaccine in mid-March 2021 due to concerns about vaccine-induced thrombosis and thrombocytopenia. Many warned that this risked damaging public confidence during a critical period of pandemic response. This study investigated whether the pause in the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had an impact on subsequent vaccine uptake in European countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Public Health Policy
March 2022
The equitable global allocation of COVID-19 vaccines has received much attention yet been poorly defined. Understanding equity requires assessing needs for vaccines across countries. Making distinctions is especially challenging when countries perform similarly on traditional epidemiological metrics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose Of Review: The COVID-19 pandemic is a global catastrophe that has led to untold suffering and death. Many previously identified policy challenges in planning for large epidemics and pandemics have been brought to the fore, and new ones have emerged. Here, we review key policy challenges and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic in order to be better prepared for the future.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Health technology assessments (HTAs) have been suggested as a strategy to bridge the evidence-to-policy gap in public health. It is unclear to what extent HTAs have been prepared to assist decisions to implement public health interventions (PHIs). We aimed to describe the experience of HTA agencies by mapping, classifying, and analyzing the evidence content of HTAs of PHIs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBull World Health Organ
May 2021
High-dose exercise-induced cardiac outcomes may vary between sexes. However, many studies investigating the cardiovascular effects of high-dose exercise have excluded or under-recruited females. This scoping review aimed to describe the recruitment of females in studies assessing the impact of high-dose exercise on cardiovascular outcomes and describe how this has changed over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
March 2021
Background: Population groups to be prioritized for COVID-19 vaccinations in the U.S. have been determined at the Federal level, but there is variation in how States have implemented guidance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Coronavirus disease (COVID)-secure workplace guidance, including the prompt self-isolation of those with COVID-19 symptoms, is fundamental to disease control in workplaces. Despite guidance, a large number of workplace outbreaks have been observed. This study aimed to identify the proportion of symptomatic staff members attending workplaces after symptom onset or testing, and associated factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: One of the leading challenges in the 2013-2016 West African Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak was how best to quickly identify patients with EVD, separating them from those without the disease, in order to maximise limited isolation bed capacity and keep health systems functioning.
Methodology: We performed a systematic literature review to identify all published data on EVD clinical symptoms in adult patients. Data was dual extracted, and random effects meta-analysis performed for each symptom to identify symptoms with the greatest risk for EVD infection.
Purpose/setting: The extent to which distributional equity is incorporated into evaluations of the (potential or observed) impact of health taxes is unclear. This systematic review of economic and modelling evaluations investigating taxation on tobacco, sugar-sweetened-beverages (SSBs), or alcohol aims to assess the proportion that have considered distributional impact by income or socioeconomic group. Secondary aims included summarising the reported distributional impacts, for both costs and health benefits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: COVID-19 has a varied clinical presentation. Elderly patients with comorbidities are more vulnerable to severe disease. This study identifies specific symptoms and comorbidities predicting severe COVID-19 and intensive care unit (ICU) admission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Public Health Policy
June 2020
Effectively responding to global health emergencies requires substantial financial commitment from many stakeholders, including governments, multilateral agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. A major current policy challenge needs attention: how to better coordinate investment among actors aiming to address a common problem, disease outbreaks. For donors who commit colossal sums of money to outbreak response, the current model is neither efficient nor transparent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Opin Infect Dis
August 2018
Purpose Of Review: Less than two decades into the 21st century, the world has already witnessed numerous large epidemics or pandemics. These events have highlighted inadequacies in both national and international capacity for outbreak prevention, detection, and response. Here, we review some of the major challenges from a policy perspective.
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