Articles: sars-cov-2.
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Middle East Afr J Ophthalmol · Jul 2020
Evaluation of Knowledge, Attitude, and Practices toward the Outbreak Pandemic (COVID-19) Virus Disease among Ophthalmologists: A Cross-Sectional Study.
The objective was to evaluate ophthalmologists' KAP toward the outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19 disease. ⋯ KAP among ophthalmologists in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia toward COVID-19 are optimal. However, health education campaigns are needed to reinforce the current KAP and improve the level of understanding of the risks and prevention measures that, in turn, improve the confidence of ophthalmologists to provide the right care to their patients and protect themselves as well.
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Ethics consultants and critical care clinicians reflect on Seattle's early experience as the United States' first epicenter of COVID-19. We discuss ethically salient issues confronted at UW Medicine's hospitals and provide lessons for other health care institutions that may soon face what we have faced.
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Int. J. Infect. Dis. · Jul 2020
Do superspreaders generate new superspreaders? A hypothesis to explain the propagation pattern of COVID-19.
The current global propagation of COVID-19 is heterogeneous, with slow transmission continuing in many countries and exponential propagation in others, where the time that it took for the explosive spread to begin varied greatly. It is proposed that this could be explained by cascading superspreading events, in which new infections caused by a superspreader are more likely to be highly infectious. ⋯ Exposure to high viral loads may result in high-intensity infection, which exposes new cases to high viral loads. This notion is supported by experimental veterinary research.
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The Italian outbreak of COVID-19 cases is a public health emergency and there is a worldwide tremendous interest in the evaluation of the Italian epidemic evolution. Indeed, from February 2020, Italy is facing an explosion of COVID-19 cases. In particular, the Italian observed case fatality rate (CFR) is much higher than the other countries. ⋯ However, through an analysis performed for all the Italian regions, here it is shown that the deaths are localized in specific regions and that the CFRs of different Italian regions are overlapping with the rates of European countries. Moreover, through correlation analyses between CFRs and different social habits, it is shown that no positive correlation is observed between social behaviors and CFRs. In conclusion, this analysis clearly rejects the possibility that social habits and intergenerational contacts can contribute to explaining such a profound effect on the number of deaths observed in Italy during the COVID-19 outbreak and more effort should be addressed to evaluate the real amount of positive cases.