Variation in the approaches taken to contain the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic at country level has been shaped by economic and political considerations, technical capacity, and assumptions about public behaviours. To address the limited application of learning from previous pandemics, this study aimed to analyse perceived facilitators and inhibitors during the pandemic and to inform the development of an assessment tool for pandemic response planning.
Social and cultural forces shape almost every aspect of infectious disease transmission in human populations, as well as our ability to measure, understand, and respond to epidemics. For directly transmitted infections, pathogen transmission relies on human-to-human contact, with kinship, household, and societal structures shaping contact patterns that in turn determine epidemic dynamics.
Strategic planning is critical for successful pandemic management. This study aimed to identify and review the scope and analytic depth of situation analyses conducted to understand their utility, and capture the documented macro-level factors impacting pandemic management.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest global test of health leadership of our generation. There is an urgent need to provide guidance for leaders at all levels during the unprecedented preresolution recovery stage.
Test-negative designs (TNDs) can be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness by comparing the relative rates of the target disease and symptomatically similar diseases among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. However, the diagnostic tests used to identify the target disease typically suffer from imperfect sensitivity and specificity, leading to biased vaccine effectiveness estimates.
To familiarize the reader with the most common cutaneous adverse events with immune checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs) and their grading and treatment.
COVID-19 spread rapidly in Brazil despite the country’s well established health and social protection systems. Understanding the relationships between health-system preparedness, responses to COVID-19, and the pattern of spread of the epidemic is particularly important in a country marked by wide inequalities in socioeconomic characteristics (eg, housing and employment status) and other health risks (age structure and burden of chronic disease).