Tuesday, March 31, 2020

An urgent dispatch from the COVID-19 front lines

 The U.S. is the new epicenter for this pandemic.  Medicine is only one small tool in this war. Society must do their part.  All of our lives will depend on it.

How to track the pandemic

Doctors are begging the public for basic protective equipment.  Us. The United States of America. Supposedly the most advanced, most privileged nation in the world.




We are in a pandemic dumpster fire. There has been no centralized movement to tackle this escalating threat.  Every hospital, city, county, and state has been left to flounder on its own. I’m not the only one who’s noticed we’re completely floundering, right?  Doctors have turned to FB forums to share information and attempt to standardize care. I see physicians independently trying to coordinate an organized response. I keep thinking: Where is the leadership? Why aren’t they at the helm with a clear message and plan? Why aren’t they coordinating a supply intake and outflow? Why aren’t they coordinating plans for when frontline “soldiers” fall ill? Why haven’t they relayed standardized treatment plans? Why didn’t they push aggressively to shut everything down? We cannot even trust the CDC. The moment they recommended scarves and bandannas, they lost credibility with even the most patient amongst us.  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticizing doctors. Most of us have been amazing despite the fact we have been handed a sh*t sandwich and told to eat it. We are clinicians and healers – not politicians, not civic leaders. But what do I know? I’m an overeducated cog in the machine.

Like beggars, we are pleading to any who will listen to give the five masks they have stuffed somewhere in their garage.  Some have resorted to sewing masks, others McGyvering their own. How did this even become an acceptable option? And now this.  Rather than asking us, “How can we help? What do you need?”, administrators tell us to be quiet, cease and desist, wear your (one time use) mask for a week, spray down with Lysol, don’t wear masks at all – you’ll scare the patients. No, you can’t wear what you bought. Don’t talk to the public; don’t talk to the media.  Do you have a fever? No, you can’t be tested. No, you can’t stay home. We are their golden geese and nothing more. Put on your Lysol sprayed mask and keep working.

I am the first to admit that I am bitter. I am angry.  Like many of you, I cannot look away, and the more I look, the more the rage grows.  The fuel isn’t just the malignant negligence on the part of leaders, but the sheer apathy from the public.  It is too much to ask people to stop eating out, stop going to bars, stop with the brunches, the playdates, the trips, and church. Even when we say they are surely killing others and making our jobs impossible, they continue life as usual.

We are physicians. We are experts at triaging and prioritizing action. Our decisions mean the difference between life and death. We regularly balance competing interests in the setting of constrained resources. We fight hard for our patients. Our job has been likened to “walking through minefields in clown shoes.” It breeds humility. If we make a bad decision, the unthinkable happens. And we are frequently reminded of the fragility of life. We have glimpsed the future of COVID-19 and are horrified. At this point, New York alone is outpacing Lombardia, and the U.S. is outpacing every Western country thus far. We aren’t waiting for the cavalry to ride in, because there isn’t one coming. It’s up to us.

How to track the pandemic

Here’s what we should demand of our state and federal governments

Physicians, nurses, and hospitals have been working nonstop for weeks and know the tsunami is here. We should have acted long ago, but we cannot waste time arguing about what could’ve been done. We are in the now, and we are going to need your help. The prescription for ending this epidemic is: leadership, organization, creativity, hard work, and proven public health measures. We will need to draw on every resource to do this in the most efficient and effective manner so we can save lives, and everyone else can get back to their own.

It is critical to flatten the curve. If our ventilators run out, like the toilet paper did, many will die unnecessarily because of shortages. Survival for those who become critically ill is poor, despite every desperate measure we take. Our horror as health care workers on the front line is that we have little to offer patients to change the course of their disease. States can bend the curve and “buy time” with decisive leadership and action. Buying time means we can:

Create better, widely available tests to know who is infected
Acquire PPE to protect health care workers
Adjust our “business as usual” processes
Discover a new therapy that makes this disease an inconvenience and not a death sentence
Find a vaccine that is safe and effective
Reinstate our normal life-saving care for those who are not infected
So, yes, it is incredibly important that everyone stays home now to buy us time and save lives.  But it isn’t enough. What we do with this time purchased at great expense really matters. We are at a crossroads, and the government decisions will determine the path we will take. The task may seem impossible, but it is NOT impossible. It will take unprecedented coordination and effort, but we are fortunate to have roadmaps laid out for us by Singapore and South Korea, democratic nations that are winning the war on COVID-19. South Korea’s daily case count is declining. As of March 23rd, there were more cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in New York City alone than the entire country of Korea. Singapore has lived with this for months longer than we have, yet life goes on, and they have not shut down schools. Their strategy and coordinated efforts have paid off. What it requires, however, is decisive and strong leadership along with the humility to recognize that this is neither “business as usual” nor “disaster as usual.” We cannot be Italy – we will fail.

Here are the immediate steps that governments should take:

Shelter in place. We must limit all nonessential contact to reduce the spread of the virus. This cannot last forever but it will be important to implement the strategies we need.

Strategic planning and organization. We should employ and leverage every resource available in our state to fight this. A team of non-medical professionals, working in parallel to our health systems, state and universities, should be established to offload work and support the state’s COVID-19 response. Best practices and treatment breakthroughs should be distributed widely among the health care community. While the hospitals and physicians are working and preparing, this group should start now working to assist in the following ways:

Determine a strategic plan and framework for prioritizing needs, opportunities, barriers, and communications
Work with the state and federal leadership to overcome regulatory barriers to implementing interventions quickly
Identify and implement initiatives that must be done at the state level and cannot be accomplished by individual health systems alone
Identify and communicate best practices across the state to every overburdened hospital system
Coordinate partnerships with the many corporations willing and poised to make a huge impact
Develop and deploy technology (or workers from other industries) that can make traditional public health measures, such as contact tracing and isolation, scalable
Control hospital hot spots. Hospitals are a major source of spread for COVID-19. If patients decompensate, they tend to do so on day 7 or 8. Patients should only come to the hospital if they need services that cannot be rendered in another location. Hotels, nursing homes, conference facilities, concert venues could be repurposed to house patients who cannot care for themselves at home. We should follow Singapore and Hong Kong, who set up trailer parks and dorms along with home delivery services to those in quarantine. Patients can be monitored via telemedicine for changes in respiratory rate or oxygen saturation to indicate if they need more intensive medical care. If this occurs, they can be taken to dedicated COVID-19 hospitals, where the risk to health care workers is concentrated, and there are no other patients who will become infected by nosocomial spread.

A current issue facing hospitals is the EMTALA law that states no patient can be turned away from the hospital.  Emergency physicians fully support this law, but in this case, it creates a challenge because patients cannot be directed to a designated “COVID-19 hospital” but instead must be fully assessed at whichever hospital they present to first, thus increasing and distributing the risk of health care worker exposure to COVID-19 at additional sites.

How to track the pandemic

The following policies can help containment:

Changes to hospital policies, processes, and organization to focus on containment
Create regulatory guidance instructing patients, EMS and health systems to allow known COVID-19 patients to be sent preferentially to COVID-19 hospitals where care can be cohorted, reducing risk other patients and health care workers
Build or repurpose alternative housing for COVID-19 positive patients who do not need critical care and the homeless who need quarantine
Build telemedicine services to supp

So, yes, it is incredibly important that everyone stays home now to buy us time and save lives.  But it isn’t enough. What we do with this time purchased at great expense really matters. We are at a crossroads, and the government decisions will determine the path we will take. The task may seem impossible, but it is NOT impossible. It will take unprecedented coordination and effort, but we are fortunate to have roadmaps laid out for us by Singapore and South Korea, democratic nations that are winning the war on COVID-19. South Korea’s daily case count is declining. As of March 23rd, there were more cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in New York City alone than the entire country of Korea. Singapore has lived with this for months longer than we have, yet life goes on, and they have not shut down schools. Their strategy and coordinated efforts have paid off. What it requires, however, is decisive and strong leadership along with the humility to recognize that this is neither “business as usual” nor “disaster as usual.” We cannot be Italy – we will fail.

How to track the pandemic

Here are the immediate steps that governments should take:

Shelter in place. We must limit all nonessential contact to reduce the spread of the virus. This cannot last forever but it will be important to implement the strategies we need.

Strategic planning and organization. We should employ and leverage every resource available in our state to fight this. A team of non-medical professionals, working in parallel to our health systems, state and universities, should be established to offload work and support the state’s COVID-19 response. Best practices and treatment breakthroughs should be distributed widely among the health care community. While the hospitals and physicians are working and preparing, this group should start now working to assist in the following ways:

Determine a strategic plan and framework for prioritizing needs, opportunities, barriers, and communications
Work with the state and federal leadership to overcome regulatory barriers to implementing interventions quickly
Identify and implement initiatives that must be done at the state level and cannot be accomplished by individual health systems alone
Identify and communicate best practices across the state to every overburdened hospital system
Coordinate partnerships with the many corporations willing and poised to make a huge impact
Develop and deploy technology (or workers from other industries) that can make traditional public health measures, such as contact tracing and isolation, scalable
Control hospital hot spots. Hospitals are a major source of spread for COVID-19. If patients decompensate, they tend to do so on day 7 or 8. Patients should only come to the hospital if they need services that cannot be rendered in another location. Hotels, nursing homes, conference facilities, concert venues could be repurposed to house patients who cannot care for themselves at home. We should follow Singapore and Hong Kong, who set up trailer parks and dorms along with home delivery services to those in quarantine. Patients can be monitored via telemedicine for changes in respiratory rate or oxygen saturation to indicate if they need more intensive medical care. If this occurs, they can be taken to dedicated COVID-19 hospitals, where the risk to health care workers is concentrated, and there are no other patients who will become infected by nosocomial spread.

How to track the pandemic

A current issue facing hospitals is the EMTALA law that states no patient can be turned away from the hospital.  Emergency physicians fully support this law, but in this case, it creates a challenge because patients cannot be directed to a designated “COVID-19 hospital” but instead must be fully assessed at whichever hospital they present to first, thus increasing and distributing the risk of health care worker exposure to COVID-19 at additional sites.

The following policies can help containment:

Changes to hospital policies, processes, and organization to focus on containment
Create regulatory guidance instructing patients, EMS and health systems to allow known COVID-19 patients to be sent preferentially to COVID-19 hospitals where care can be cohorted, reducing risk other patients and health care workers
Build or repurpose alternative housing for COVID-19 positive patients who do not need critical care and the homeless who need quarantine
Build telemedicine services to support home care and identify patients who need to be hospitalized
Coordinate hospitals at a state level, to allow for isolation of COVID-19 positive patients in the most efficient manner, limit risk and nosocomial spread
Protect health care workers.  Even with appropriate PPE usage, American physicians and nurses have already died. Health care workers need to be appropriately protected to conserve this vital workforce, but also to snuff out the pandemic. In Italy, nearly 1 in 10 of those infected are health care workers. Health care worker infection is a driving force in the spread. It is unethical to expect health care workers to martyr themselves without proper protection. And that means appropriate PPE as well as changes to the “business as usual” processes. The crisis standard of care is triggered by the need for containment, not by volume surges. We can accomplish this with changes to our operations. In the SARS response in Taiwan, utilizing best practices for isolation and triage dramatically reduced health care worker and patient infections. In the 18 hospitals implementing these best practices, zero health care workers and only two patients developed nosocomial SARS infection. In contrast, in the 33 control hospitals, 115 HWSs, and 203 patients developed SARS. Health care workers do not need to die to provide care. If they do, it is a failure of leadership, not knowledge or technology.

Deploy federal disaster assistance. FEMA is an expert in disaster management and communications. The National Guard could be directed to provide boots-on-the-ground assistance. Among the many ways they could help:

Deploy to hospitals and serve as “officers” to watch health care workers as they doff (take off) their PPE to be sure they are not self-contaminating during this most critical step
Assist in rapid deployment of video intercom technology
Set up tent triage to contain and limit the spread of infection
Create community COVID-19 housing in a hotel or other location
Assist in performing mass screening and testing
Perform contact screening per Department of Health protocols
Expand proven public health measures:  The lack of testing has been catastrophic because traditional public health surveillance and case tracking measures have not been available. It is nearly impossible to screen for this virus, given that infected patients can be minimally symptomatic with a diverse array of symptoms. As soon as testing comes available, either PCR or antibody testing, it should be ramped up and deployed as quickly as possible. We will need to change our normal business practices and make this testing widely available.  We need a method to track and communicate results to patients and the department of public health.   Singapore and South Korea perform  “contact tracing” on COVID-19 positive patients and isolate individuals who are at high risk of contracting the virus.  Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general, gives this advice: “Find, isolate, test and treat every case, and trace every contact.”

How to track the pandemic







An urgent dispatch from the COVID-19 front lines:

How Canadian AI start-up BlueDot spotted Coronavirus before anyone else had a clue

An AI-based infectious disease surveillance system that searches the world around-the-clock for possible pandemics should have your attention.

How Canadian AI start-up BlueDot spotted Coronavirus before anyone else had a clue

On December 30, 2019, BlueDot, a Toronto-based startup that uses a platform built around artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data to track and predict the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases, alerted its private sector and government clients about a cluster of “unusual pneumonia” cases happening around a market in Wuhan, China.

BlueDot published the first scientific paper on COVID-19, accurately predicting its global spread using our proprietary models. BlueDot disseminated bespoke, near-real-time insights to clients including governments, hospitals, and airlines, revealing COVID-19’s movements. Our intelligence is based on over 40 pathogen-specific datasets reflecting disease mobility and outbreak potential.

BlueDot delivers regular reporting to answer the most pressing questions, including which countries reported local cases, how severely cities outside of China were affected, and which cities risked transmitting COVID-19 despite having no official cases.

How it Works
BlueDot quantifies the risk of exposure to infectious diseases globally, enabling you to protect human health.

We detect outbreaks of over 150 different pathogens, toxins, and syndromes in near-real-time. Our platform scan over 100,000 official and mass media sources in 65 languages per day.

We anticipate dispersion of disease, locally and globally, using anonymous, aggregated data on billions of flight itineraries and hundreds of millions of mobile devices.

We anticipate the impact of disease spread globally and globally using diverse datasets:

Billions of flight itineraries
Real-time climate conditions
Health system capacity
Animal & insect populations
We empower you to mobilize timely, effective, efficient, coordinated, and measured responses to epidemic threats

How does Bluedot work?
BlueDot is proprietary software-as-a-service designed to locate, track and predict infectious disease spread. The BlueDot engine gathers data on over 150 diseases and syndromes around the world searching every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. This includes official data from organizations like the Center for Disease Control or the World Health Organization. But, the system also counts on less structured information.

Much of BlueDot's predictive ability comes from data it collects outside official health care sources including, for example, the worldwide movements of more than four billion travelers on commercial flights every year; human, animal and insect population data; climate data from satellites; and local information from journalists and healthcare workers, pouring through 100,000 online articles each day spanning 65 languages.

BlueDot’s specialists manually classified the data, developed a taxonomy so relevant keywords could be scanned efficiently, and then applied machine learning and natural language processing to train the system. As a result, it says, only a handful of cases are flagged for human experts to analyze.

BlueDot sends out regular alerts to health care, government, business, and public health clients. The alerts provide brief synopses of anomalous disease outbreaks that its AI engine has discovered and the risks they may pose.

In the case of COVID-19, the system flagged articles in Chinese that reported 27 pneumonia cases associated with a market that had seafood and live animals in Wuhan. In addition to the alert, BlueDot correctly identified the cities that were highly connected to Wuhan using things like global airline ticketing data to help anticipate where the infected might be traveling. The international destinations that BlueDot anticipated would have the highest volume of travelers from Wuhan were: Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Phuket, Seoul, and Singapore. In the end, 11 of the cities at the top of their list were the first places to see COVID-19 cases.

COVID-19 was not BlueDot’s first hit. The engine has been used to successfully predict that the Zika virus would spread to Florida in 2016, six months before it happened. The software also determined that the 2014 Ebola outbreak would leave West Africa.

The company received a total of $9.4 million in funding in 2019 (including seed funding from Horizons Ventures and a $7 million Series A financing round led by The Co-operators and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund) and now employs a diverse team of 44 people including veterinarians, doctors, epidemiologists, engineers, data scientists and software developers.

Khan is careful not to claim that AI is the total solution to the problem of infectious disease transmission:

By no means would we claim that AI has got this problem solved. It’s just one of the tools in the toolbox. We don’t use artificial intelligence to replace human intelligence, we basically use it to find the needles in the haystack and present them to our team for further investigation and analysis.

But, as the COVID-19 and the Zika discoveries illustrate, finding that needle is no easy or ordinary feat. BlueDot’s automated infectious disease surveillance platform is an invaluable early warning system that can provide a time-critical heads-up to health professionals around the world and potentially save thousands of lives. That, IMHO, is a very good use of AI’s disruptive power.

Image credit - via BlueDot website




How Canadian AI start-up BlueDot spotted Coronavirus before anyone else had a clue:

Monday, March 30, 2020

Pentagon watchdog tapped to lead committee overseeing $2 trillion coronavirus package

Glenn Fine, Inspector General 
for CARES Act


The nation's top government watchdogs on Monday appointed Glenn Fine, the acting inspector general for the Pentagon, to lead the newly created committee that oversees the implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill signed by President Donald Trump last week.  

Fine will lead a panel of fellow inspectors general, dubbed the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, and command an $80 million budget meant to "promote transparency and support oversight" of the massive disaster response legislation. His appointment was made by a fellow committee of inspectors general, assigned by the new law to pick a chairman of the committee. 

Fine, who served as Justice Department inspector general from 2000 to 2011 — spanning parts of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies — will join nine other inspectors general on the new committee. They include the IGs of the Departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, and the Treasury; the inspector general of the Small Business Administration; and the Treasury inspector general for Tax Administration.

“Mr. Fine is uniquely qualified to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, given his more than 15 years of experience as an Inspector General overseeing large organizations — 11 years as the Department of Justice Inspector General and the last 4 years performing the duties of the Department of Defense Inspector General," said Michael Horowitz, the top watchdog at the Justice Department who leads the group of inspectors general that made the appointment. "The Inspector-General Community recognizes the need for transparency surrounding, and strong and effective independent oversight of, the federal government’s spending in response to this public health crisis."

There are political repercussions regarding Fine's mandate to oversee spending and stop misappropriations to other President's goals.
























Pentagon Watch Dog

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Corona Virus, Some Countries have managed to Flatten the Curve



A new respiratory virus, thought to have originated in a food market in Wuhan, China, has put health authorities on high alert. The spread of the novel coronavirus—named 2019-nCoV—has impacted travel, business and spread concern around the world.


The coronavirus outbreak is now a pandemic, the World Health Organization declared on March 11, as global confirmed cases of Covid-19 now surpass 650,000 worldwide, with deaths topping 30,000. The outbreak has spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan in late January to more than 140 countries and territories—affecting every continent except Antarctica—in the course of a month. Cases in Europe now exceed the number in China. Efforts to prevent the pneumonia-like illness from spreading further have led to shuttered cities, widespread flight cancellations and shaken financial markets.

Inevitable Covid 19 Asteroid



Where deaths have occurredDeathsCases
Italy10,02392,472
Spain5,81272,248
Mainland China3,29581,394
Iran2,51735,408
France2,31437,575
U.S.1,955138,648
U.K.1,01917,089
Netherlands6399,762
Germany40356,202
Australia4033,583
Belgium3539,134
Switzerland24213,377
South Korea1449,478
Turkey1087,402
Sweden1053,447
Indonesia1021,155
Portugal1005,170
Brazil933,477
Austria688,188
Philippines681,075
Denmark652,201
Canada554,757
Japan491,499
Ecuador481,823
Iraq42506
Ireland362,415
Egypt36576
Greece321,061
Romania301,452
Algeria29454


Tracking the Spread of the Coronavirus Outbreak in the U.S.


Since the first U.S. case of the new coronavirus was reported on Jan. 20 in Washington state, more than 110,000 people have been diagnosed, with clusters around New York City, Seattle and in California. At least 1,972 people have died. American health officials have identified multiple people with Covid-19, as the infection is called, without known ties to other outbreaks or patients—a sign the virus is transmitting person-to-person. A lack of testing has hamstrung health workers’ efforts to track the infection.



As cases in the U.S. continue to increase, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered New Yorkers on March 20 to stay at home for the foreseeable future, the U.S. implemented travel restrictions on flights from Europe and markets have plummeted.


The number of tests performed by each state has varied greatly. As one of the first sources of the outbreak in the U.S., Washington state began widespread testing relatively early. Recently, New York state significantly increased testing, with more than 15,000 additional tests reported on March 23. However, many states have yet to test more than 1,000 people.


Mapping New York City Hospital Beds as Coronavirus Cases Surge

New York City is the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, putting historic pressure on a world-renowned healthcare system as the number of confirmed cases in the area grows exponentially.


Bloomberg News is tracking how many beds are in each hospital in the city, and is monitoring the search for new ones as the number of cases soars daily.
Much information is unavailable. Citywide hospitalization figures have been updated only sporadically, and hospitals haven’t been disclosing their occupancy or their data on intensive care units and life-saving ventilators. 

Hospital Beds and Surge Beds in New York City

2,000
Javits Center
1,000
USNS
Comfort
600
Brooklyn Health
Center for Rehab
and Healthcare
350
Coler
Specialty
Hospital
150
Westchester
Square Hospital
120
North Central
Bronx Hospital
250
Various
hotel rooms
23,000 Existing beds
  • Hospitals
  •  
  • Surge locations announced
  •  
  • Surge locations built
Pulmonary Image in Covid-19