Breathing fresh air into the debate: Ventilators and the United States' intellectual property problem.

In 2006, the U.S. federal government launched a project to create a cheap, easily produced, and easy to use ventilator that could be stored for long periods of time for pandemic response. Despite successful funding and contracts with two separate medical device companies, not a single ventilator had been added to the stockpile by 2020. The company currently under federal contract for these ventilators is selling its product to private parties, rather than supplying it to the federal government. In the current crisis, government has instead turned to the Defense Production Act to supply ventilators. Inaccessibility of medical equipment is a detriment to Americans' health, particularly during a public health emergency like COVID-19. This persists despite the central role of the federal government in the funding of healthcare innovation. We place the shortage of ventilators in context of the ongoing debate about the federal government's intellectual property powers, as well as the legal recourses available, then discuss why this situation is a strong argument for expanding compulsory licensing powers as a component of federal policy.

Accuracy of Case-Based Seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in Maricopa County, Arizona.

We conducted a community seroprevalence survey in Arizona, from September 12 to October 1, 2020, to determine the presence of antibodies to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). We used the seroprevalence estimate to predict SARS-CoV-2 infections in the jurisdiction by applying the adjusted seroprevalence to the county's population. The estimated community seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infections was 4.3 times greater (95% confidence interval = 2.2, 7.5) than the number of reported cases. Field surveys with representative sampling provide data that may help fill in gaps in traditional public health reporting. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(1):38-42. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306568).

COVID-19 healthcare demand projections: Arizona.

Beginning in March 2020, the United States emerged as the global epicenter for COVID-19 cases with little to guide policy response in the absence of extensive data available for reliable epidemiological modeling in the early phases of the pandemic. In the ensuing weeks, American jurisdictions attempted to manage disease spread on a regional basis using non-pharmaceutical interventions (i.e., social distancing), as uneven disease burden across the expansive geography of the United States exerted different implications for policy management in different regions. While Arizona policymakers relied initially on state-by-state national modeling projections from different groups outside of the state, we sought to create a state-specific model using a mathematical framework that ties disease surveillance with the future burden on Arizona's healthcare system. Our framework uses a compartmental system dynamics model using a SEIRD framework that accounts for multiple types of disease manifestations for the COVID-19 infection, as well as the observed time delay in epidemiological findings following public policy enactments. We use a compartment initialization logic coupled with a fitting technique to construct projections for key metrics to guide public health policy, including exposures, infections, hospitalizations, and deaths under a variety of social reopening scenarios. Our approach makes use of X-factor fitting and backcasting methods to construct meaningful and reliable models with minimal available data in order to provide timely policy guidance in the early phases of a pandemic.