United States

This article reports on the potential that ventilators may be reallocated from long-term care facilities to hospitals to respond to resource scarcity due to COVID-19 case surge, including the controversial possibility of disconnecting ventilators currently in use by long-term ventilator-dependent Read More

This draft legal analysis addresses whether existing protocols for rationing scarce resources comply with moral principles and with anti-discrimination laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and concludes that existing approaches adopting a utilitarian approach will have the effect Read More

This study quantified child-care obligations for US health-care workers arising from school closures and estimated the trade-off between reduced COVID-19 transmission and the role of health-care labor in cumulative mortality. The study describes scenarios in which school closures, in the Read More

This preliminary description of pediatric U.S. COVID-19 cases reports that relatively few children with COVID-19 are hospitalized, and fewer children than adults experience fever, cough, or shortness of breath. The report also describes severe outcomes reported in children, including three Read More

This article describes efforts by the Trump administration to use the Defense Production Act to compel N95 respirator manufacturer 3M to increase importation to the US of respirators the company manufacturers overseas and allegedly to stop exporting US-made respirators to Read More

This study projected the COVID-19–associated demand for hospital and ICU beds within the United States via an age-structured dynamic model of SARS–CoV-2 transmission, parameterized with the US population demographics and latest estimates from global COVID-19 outbreaks. In the wake of Read More

This article reports on guidelines released by Northwell Health, one of New York state’s largest hospital systems, outlining institutional processes for allocating ventilators toward patients most likely to benefit should the need arise due to resource scarcity. According to the Read More

This report details a decision tree algorithm that may help guide decisions for protecting health care workers during surgery in the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the risk of infection with COVID-19 to healthcare workers, a team developed an institutional algorithm to Read More

This recently updated guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that all U.S. healthcare facilities begin using contingency strategies for personal protective equipment (PPE). The previous version of this guidance provided optimization strategies for various Read More

This article offers a roadmap to improving coordination between the states and federal COVID-19 response. Under the U.S. Constitutional structure, public health governance largely occurs at the state and local, rather than the federal, level, resulting in a “patchwork response Read More