Overcoming Anti-Vaccine Rhetoric With the recent announcement of an impending COVID-19 vaccine, former CDC director Tom Frieden commented on the effect of misinformation and vaccine hesitancy. He argues that critical components of effective public health risk messaging has been conspicuously
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The United States has failed to follow many of the best practices in health and crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, given that the virus continues to spread, there is still an opportunity to use evidence-based practices moving forward
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What Healthcare Professionals Need to Know about COVID-19 Vaccination Plans The CDC released this publication, which discusses “Operation Warp Speed”, the global race to produce a successful COVID-19 vaccination. With the likelihood of a vaccine being produced by the end
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Testing & School Reopening Authors of a New England Journal of Medicine perspective this week propose that making routine Covid-19 testing available in schools should be a top national response priority, and they critique the lack of inclusion of testing
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Worker Safety A lawsuit in an Oregon Federal Court highlights concerns about failing to adequately engage non-English speaking workers in workplace pandemic safety efforts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, food processing plants have been a frequent outbreak hot spots, and such
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In-home testing kits for COVID-19 In this article, the authors discuss testing kits that have been FDA approved for diagnosing COVID-19 in the home. In April 2020, LabCorp developed the first FDA-approved, in-home collection kit, followed Everlywell who developed a
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Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution Recommendations Friday, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) issued the final version of its Framework for Equitable Allocation of Covid-19 Vaccine. Recognizing that once a vaccine is approved (in some form or another), demand
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Clinical Characteristics Within a cohort study of 1641 adult patients with SARS-CoV-2, an elevated red blood cell distribution width (RDW) at admission and increasing RDW during hospitalization were associated with statistically higher increased in mortality risk. Within this meta-analysis
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Nursing Home Quality & Safety Earlier this month, the Coronavirus Commission for Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes issued their final report for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The task of the Commission was “to solicit lessons
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Nationwide Eviction Freeze The CDC issued an Emergency Action this week implementing a nationwide temporary freeze on evictions. The freeze runs from September 4 through December 31, 2020. Here is a link to the CDC’s Declaration Form which must be filled
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