In a new study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers have created a dataset and data visualization dashboard to evaluate the effectiveness of state and territory-level policies enacted to reduce the severity of COVID-19's impact on older people served by home health care agencies and nursing homes.
The authors found many policies within states and territories did not correspond with reductions in community or nursing home-level COVID-19 burden (i.e. number of cases and mortality counts). This suggests that policy effectiveness may depend on implementation and compliance. The study also found that policies focused less on home health care agencies compared with nursing homes, despite both settings serving vulnerable older populations.
While it found that global uptake of at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose was robust, a new survey published in Nature Medicine revealed mixed signals about the current acceptance of vaccines generally, especially COVID-19 boosters. ...
"The repercussions of pandemic disruptions in health care services, the effects of the inequitable and slow global vaccine distribution, and the prevalence of misinformation and mistrust in health authorities continue to be felt," says Jeffrey V. Lazarus, Professor of Global Health at CUNY SPH, head of the Health Systems Research Group at Barcelona Institute for Global Health, and coordinator of the study.
...genomic surveillance could do much more to reduce the toll of disease and death worldwide than just protect us from COVID-19. Writing inFrontiers in Science, an international collective of clinical and public health microbiologists from the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) calls for investment in technology, capacity, expertise, and collaboration to put genomic surveillance of pathogens at the forefront of future pandemic preparedness.
There is no way to predict if the virus will acquire the capacity to spread between people, or when and under what conditions it would make that fateful leap if it does.
