Articles: pandemics.
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The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted delivery of health care services worldwide. We examined the impact of the pandemic on clinics participating in the Veterans Affairs (VA) Clinical Resource Hub (CRH) program, rolled out nationally in October 2019, to improve access to care at under-resourced VA clinics or "spoke" sites through telehealth services delivered by regional "hub" sites. ⋯ VA's pre-pandemic rollout of a new primary care telehealth program intended to improve access facilitated primary care visits during the pandemic, a period fraught with care disruptions, and limited in-person health care delivery, indicating the potential for the program to offer health system resilience.
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Childhood and adolescence are critical periods of physiological growth as well as development in biological, emotional, and social domains. During the COVID-19 pandemic, children and adolescent's lives were drastically changed. Many countries including the United Kingdom and Ireland imposed strict universal lockdowns, which included the closing of creches, schools and universities as well as restricting peer interactions, social activities, and recreational pursuits. Evidence is emerging of a catastrophic impact on the younger generation, which leads the authors to explore the ethicality of the COVID-19 response in this population in relation to the four pillars of medical ethics: beneficence, nomaleficence, autonomy, and justice.
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Perioperative Mortality of the COVID-19 Recovered Patient Compared to a Matched Control: A Multicenter Retrospective Cohort Study.
Surgical procedures performed on patients with recent exposure to COVID-19 infection have been associated with increased mortality risk in previous studies. Accordingly, elective surgery is often delayed after infection. The study aimed to compare 30-day hospital mortality and postoperative complications (acute kidney injury, pulmonary complications) of surgical patients with a previous COVID-19 infection to a matched cohort of patients without known previous COVID-19. The authors hypothesized that COVID-19 exposure would be associated with an increased mortality risk. ⋯ Patients with a positive test for COVID-19 before elective surgery early in the pandemic have an elevated risk of perioperative mortality and pulmonary complications but not acute kidney injury as compared to matched controls. The span of time from positive test to time of surgery affected the mortality and pulmonary risk, which subsided after 2 weeks.