Editor's Note From January through April 2020, emergency department (ED) visits decreased and hospital admissions increased in this study of five healthcare systems in five states. In the 24 EDs studied, the annual volume before the COVID-19 pandemic ranged from 13,000 to 115,000 visits per year. The largest decrease in…

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Editor's Note The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on August 4 released the 2021 proposed payment rule for ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) and hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs). Among the proposals in the rule: CMS proposes to expand the number of procedures that Medicare would pay for when performed…

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Editor's Note The use of an automated web-based symptom monitoring tool as part of Maine's COVID-19 contact tracing program made the state's contact tracing and monitoring faster and more efficient. The tool was well received, with the majority of monitored contacts (96.4%) agreeing to the automated system. Contacts automatically received…

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Editor's Note The Curial AI test, an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed at the University of Oxford, UK, can identify COVID-19 within 1 hour of a patient arriving at an emergency department (ED), the July 31 Belfast Telegraph reports. The AI test analyzes patient data, such as blood tests and…

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Editor's Note This study finds that front-line healthcare workers with adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) had a three-fold increased risk of testing positive for COVID-19, compared to the general population. Those with inadequate PPE had a further increase in risk. The study also found that healthcare workers from Black, Asian,…

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Editor's Note Johnson & Johnson (J&J) announced July 30 that it has started its human safety trials to assess its COVID-19 vaccine, after reporting on details of its animal study. A single dose of the vaccine completely protected all six animals from lung disease and five of six from infection,…

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Editor's Note This study found a temporal association between school closures statewide and lower COVID-19 incidence and mortality, but some of the reductions may have been related to other concurrent interventions. At the time of school closure, the incidence of COVID-19 ranged from 0 to 14.75 cases per 100,000 population.…

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Editor's Note This study, led by researchers from King’s College London, analyzed data on 1,600 patients who reported their symptoms daily into an app. They differentiated the patients into six groups from least to most severe symptoms: Headache, loss of smell, muscle pains, cough, sore throat, chest pain, no fever.…

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Editor's Note This survey on the “Impact of COVID-19 on healthcare associated infections” provides a snapshot of how resource diversion for the COVID-19 is affecting the infection prevention community. Of 220 respondents, 79.1% said they were spending more than 75% of their time on COVID-19 response efforts and another 13.2%…

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Editor's Note This study found that whole lung radiomics from non-contrast chest CT exams were better than radiologists’ assessments for predicting outcomes in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia. The findings also showed that combining radiomics with clinical variables and lab data were associated with better predictions of ICU admissions and mortality.…

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