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COVID-19
Newsletter
Volume 2 | March 31, 2020
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COVID-19 is impacting everyone’s life. However, our hearts particularly go out to families around the world who have lost loved ones during this pandemic. We also honor and extend our immense gratitude to healthcare personnel, emergency and essential workers worldwide who are on the frontlines providing care to the ill and ensuring that key services continue to function.
To assist you in our common goal to save lives in the midst of this global, public health crisis, CUGH is aggregating and sharing useful resources from around the word. We are also advocating for the implementation of policies needed by health systems to combat this pandemic. To access this information, click on the underlined texts below.
Join us on Thursday, April 2 at 5:30 PM EDT for a
special
webinar
on the view from New York: At the Frontlines of the Pandemic.
Register here
.
Please send us any important public health guidelines/articles/advocacy efforts related to the pandemic to
info@cugh.org
. We will share some of this information via these weekly updates. Please distribute this newsletter widely so others can benefit from this material.
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Keith Martin MD
Executive Director
CUGH
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This newsletter is divided into the following sections:
- Advocacy efforts
- Resources for educators
- Resources for researchers
- Resources for clinical work
- Member requests
- Other resources
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Join us on Thursday, April 2 at 5:30 - 6:30 PM EDT to hear from public health experts on the situation in New York, an epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn about the reality on the ground, what they need, what others can learn from their plight, what LMICs are facing, and what we must do now to bend the curve of the pandemic.
Register here.
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CUGH outlined policy measures the
U.S. Government need to enact in order to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are also encouraging those who have the appropriate skills and who can, to join volunteer medical corps in your area to assist in the response to the pandemic.
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This website from Johns Hopkins University
is an outstanding resource to help advance the understanding of the virus, inform the public, and brief policymakers in order to guide a response, improve care, and save lives. It includes access to an interactive COVID-19 map.
For more information and for updates on
the emerging novel coronavirus, sign up for Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security's
Situation Reports
.
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Tulane Outbreak Daily
is a curated daily wrap-up of the timeliest and most relevant news and data focused on emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19. It will be disseminated Monday through Friday and will provide a carefully curated list of featured headlines, surveillance reporting and abstracts of relevant peer-reviewed research designed to update readers on the most important news related to COVID-19 and other emerging infectious diseases and public health topics.
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COVID-19 disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable: sharp increases in caseloads will overwhelm health systems in countries already facing shortages of workers and supplies. With millions of lives at stake, decisive action must be taken now to blunt the impact of the pandemic in countries likely to be hit the hardest. Investment is needed at all levels of the health system and Community Health Workers (CHWs) are poised to play a pivotal role in fighting the pandemic. Members of the
Community Health Impact Coalition
have come together to urgently outline the targeted actions needed to achieve the following goals:
PROTECT health care workers
INTERRUPT the virus
MAINTAIN existing health care services while surging their capacity
SHIELD the most vulnerable from socioeconomic shocks
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Please feel free to share and sign on to letter:
An Open Letter from Scholars Studying Public Health in China and the U.S.
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As healthcare professionals work on the front lines in our communities to face the COVID-19 pandemic, medical and health professions educators are responding with new learning experiences that protect the learner, reduce the impact on the healthcare systems, and impede further spread of this novel virus.
AAMC actively seek submissions of learning experiences, particularly those that support patient care, but do not involve direct patient contact. Once submitted, the resources will be included in a collection that will be free and widely available to the community of medical education.
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Universities have closed worldwide, forcing instructors to turn to remote teaching. This article from
Nature
features expert advice on how to embrace the digital classroom.
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For educators and IT administrators facing school closures, here are a few ways to engage students through distance learning
.
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RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHERS
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To assist health workers and researchers working under challenging conditions to bring this outbreak to a close,
The Lancet
has created a Coronavirus Resource Centre. This resource brings together new 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) content from across
The Lancet
journals as it is published. All of the COVID-19 content is free to access.
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Hosted by the African Academy of Sciences, this webinar aims to kick start common thinking towards defining a research agenda for the COVID-19 outbreak and provide a concerted science-based effort for combating this pandemic in Africa.
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The Global Health Technology Coalition is tracking research and development (R&D) efforts to combat SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes
Coronavirus Disease 2019
(COVID-19).
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This APA post provides guidance to individuals who were planning to present at a conference that has been cancelled, postponed, or moved online.
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T
o support the ongoing public health emergency response efforts, t
he National Science and Technology Advisors from a dozen countries called on publishers to voluntarily agree to make their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and the available data supporting them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) and other appropriate public repositories.
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RESOURCES FOR CLINICAL WORK
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WHO is conducting a survey of Health Workers to assess urgent skills development needs for COVID-19. IF you are a health worker, please complete this survey
here
. They are also trying to translate the survey quickly into as many languages as possible. If you can help, join the WhatsApp group
here
.
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The American Burn Association with global partners has organized weekly webinars to discuss current experience maintaining the care of the burn injured despite the pandemic. Speaker include front line burn surgeons and intensivists in Spain, Italy, China, and North America.
There is also have a WhatsApp group that discusses COVID-19 on an ongoing fashion.
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The rapid emergence of the COVID-19 virus across international borders has forced the redesign of clinical services to deprioritise non-urgent surgical care. Hospitals and health systems need to continue managing cancer patients, for whom a delay in treatment can lead to poorer outcomes. On the other side, maintaining treatment for cancer can put cancer patients at higher risk of post-operative complications due to the current pandemic.
There is an emergent need to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on care of cancer patients requiring surgery. CovidSurg-Cancer aims to:
- Determine the frequency of hospital-acquired COVID-19 infection in elective surgery;
- Assess the impact on COVID-19 infection on surgical outcomes;
- Evaluate the delay to elective cancer surgery caused by the pandemic and consequent impact on oncological outcomes;
- Participating centres will be able to choose to collect data on one or more of the following patient groups: breast cancer, colorectal cancer, gastric cancer.
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This interim guidance reviews special considerations for persons with HIV and their health care providers in the United States regarding COVID-19. Information and data on COVID-19 are rapidly evolving. This guidance includes general information to consider. Clinicians should refer to updated sources for more specific recommendations regarding COVID-19.
Please find Dr.
Maureen Goodenow's letter on the interim guide
here
.
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This resource is for those working with the sickle cell community. It's a worldwide registry to better understand, support and serve the needs of those living with and caring for those with sickle cell disease.
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The resource collates authentic information from Government agencies and other sources of scientific evidence in one place. The first public version is made available along with, it is a “living” document continues to be updated by the collaborative. This is a collaborative project of Indian clinicians and public health researchers.
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WHO and public health authorities around the world are acting to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. However, this time of crisis is generating stress throughout the population. The considerations presented in this document have been developed by the WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Use as a series of messages that can be used in communications to support mental and psychosocial well-being in different target groups during the outbreak.
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This curriculum is intended to train health providers and Community Health Workers on COVID- 19 (as of March 2020) transmission, symptoms, treatment and communication to the public. Given the restrictions on movement and interaction in many countries to prevent the spread of COVID-19, this training curriculum is designed to be a self-guided tool, where individuals can learn on their own. It can also be used by a facilitator with a group of trainees.
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The University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Global Health and several of its global partners developed a rapid-turnaround survey that will be used to gather a contemporaneous snapshot of the current level of readiness and response to COVID-19 among healthcare organizations in multiple LMICs.
They are asking informed members of healthcare organizations from LMICs to complete a 15 minute online survey
by April 3
. Informed members should work at the health care organization and be in a position to give accurate answers to all of the questions. The team, which includes LMIC-based collaborators, will analyze findings and write a report with recommendations on how to best advocate for and support healthcare organizations and their workforces during the current pandemic and in future emergency response situations.
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The Department of Health Policy in March 2020 convened a group of experts to offer guidance and curated reviews of current research and data related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These documents are intended for use by public health professionals and officials, and may be shared with attribution. The memos are expected to be updated as new research and data becomes available.
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The
LSHTM Viral
podcast was created by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to communicate and discuss the latest evidence on safety and control of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Their Centre for Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases has been following the COVID-19 pandem
ic closely and created a continually updated
repository page
with an overview of their work. They have divided their work on this topic under the following categories:
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Resources to test and treat COVID-19 are increasingly scarce around the world, and the question of how to allocate limited resources has become a central challenge in addressing the pandemic. Authors Lawrence Gostin, Eric Friedman, and Sarah Wetter from the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law argue that “we are all only as safe as the most vulnerable among us.”
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These strategies are intended to be a menu or toolkit of ideas that may be helpful-- caregivers may take one idea at a time and find a way to make it work for their child(ren) with autism and their family. Caregivers may want to start with a strategy they have used in the past, or perhaps find a tool to address the issue that is creating the most immediate stress. Consider involving the individual with autism in the decision-making process about what tools would be most helpful.
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Whether COVID-19 disease is already present in your community or not, organizations should begin to implement some measures in the workplace to prepare themselves and curb the spread of the new Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). These 10 measures can help keep the workforce and community safe while maintaining business operations. Organizations should implement these measures and adapt them according to their business environments.
Written by Bonaventure Dzekem, MD, MA – The University of Chicago Center for Global Health
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This 8-page booklet about the Coronavirus is written in plain language. It was created by and for people with developmental disabilities. It focuses on “need to know” information (not “nice to know” information).
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Social and behavior change (SBC) professionals have a critical role to play in this disease outbreak scenario. They are well positioned to address interventions such as proper hygiene techniques, development of SBC strategies, training of service providers, correction of misinformation, stigma reduction, and more. This resource will be updated often and be also read in French
here
.
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What can go viral faster than COVID-19? Your favorite meme or image. Messaging matters when it comes to flattening the curve and helping to keep your family, friends and neighbors safe and healthy. Share these free materials on your digital channels, and encourage others to spread the message, not the coronavirus!
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Johns Hopkins University provides five best practices on how to communicate effectively on COVID-19.
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This article, written by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Dr. Raj Panjabi, addresses lessons learned from the response to Ebola that are applicable to COVID-19.
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In response to the current COVID-19 pandemic, FutureLearn is working hard to support the global network of learners. Some of the courses they are currently running in direct response to the pandemic are:
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Consortium of Universities for Global Health
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