Emergency management pandemic planning: An analysis of state emergency plans.

Conventional wisdom holds that pre-event planning is a key factor in effective disaster response. In assessing the response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, it is necessary to evaluate the extent to which emergency management agencies were prepared to respond to a pandemic, particularly given the unusual nature of this event, ie, scope, scale, and length of response. While emergency management agencies at every level of government have been involved in the COVID-19 response, state-level governments have taken on a prominent and atypical lead-ership role.

Displacement after disaster: Challenges and opportunities responding to Puerto Rican evacuees in Central Florida after Hurricane Maria.

Major disasters often displace populations, requiring coordinated response efforts from governmental and voluntary organizations to support and assist an influx of evacuees. Despite the frequency and significance of this occurrence, this aspect of disaster management has received limited scholarly attention, with research predominantly focusing on response and recovery at the impacted disaster sites. This study investigates disaster management and support offered to Puerto Rican evacuees arriving in Central Florida after Hurricane Maria.

Displacement after disaster: Challenges and opportunities responding to Puerto Rican evacuees in Central Florida after Hurricane Maria.

Major disasters often displace populations, requiring coordinated response efforts from governmental and voluntary organizations to support and assist an influx of evacuees. Despite the frequency and significance of this occurrence, this aspect of disaster management has received limited scholarly attention, with research predominantly focusing on response and recovery at the impacted disaster sites. This study investigates disaster management and support offered to Puerto Rican evacuees arriving in Central Florida after Hurricane Maria.

Challenges of Using Instant Communication Technology in the Emergency Department during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Focus Group Study.

A record outbreak of community-spread COVID-19 started on 10 May 2021, in Taiwan. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, care facilities have adopted various protocols using instant communication technology (ICT) to provide remote yet timely healthcare while ensuring staff safety. The challenges of patient evaluation in the emergency department (ED) using ICT are seldom discussed in the literature.

Protective policies for all? An analysis of Covid-19 deaths and protective policies among low-, medium-, and high-vulnerability groups.

Protective policies have been unequally and inconsistently applied in the United States throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. This study investigates the relationship between state and local policies and Covid-19 deaths, combining three datasets: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index; local laws and regulations from the COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (AMP) database; and Covid-19 deaths by county reported by The New York Times. It examines, using propensity score matching, local policies and regulations as treatments during the crisis, and assesses how, inter alia, face mask requirements, gathering restrictions, stay-at-home orders, and social distancing mandates enacted at the county level altered Covid-19 deaths.

Electronic cigarettes in the indoor environment.

The use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes or "vaping") has seen an unprecedented increase worldwide. Vaping has been promoted as a beneficial smoking cessation tool and an alternative nicotine delivery device that contains no combustion by-products. However, nicotine is highly addictive, and the increased use of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes among teens and individuals who are not in need of smoking cessation may lead to overall greater nicotine dependence in the population.

A Gap Analysis Survey of US Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting (ARFF) Members to Determine Highly Infectious Disease Training and Education Needs.

Objective: Despite lessons learned from the recent Ebola epidemic, attempts to survey and determine non-health care worker, industry-specific needs to address highly infectious diseases have been minimal. The aircraft rescue and fire fighting (ARFF) industry is often overlooked in highly infectious disease training and education, even though it is critical to their field due to elevated occupational exposure risk during their operations.

Methods: A 44-question gap analysis survey was distributed to the ARFF Working Group to determine where highly infectious education and training can be improved.

Impact of an insoluble surfactant on the thresholds of evaporative Bénard-Marangoni instability under air.

It is known that the addition of an insoluble surfactant to a Bénard-Marangoni (BM) layer heated from below or cooled from above can give rise to a supplementary, oscillatory mode of instability. Here the objective is to see how exactly this plays out in the framework of a recently studied and experimentally tested case of a non-long-wavelength BM instability driven by diffusion-limited evaporation into air in isothermal surroundings. Linear stability analysis is accomplished within a now standard reduction to a one-sided model.