Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreaks, Vaccination, Politics and Society: The Continuing Challenge

This books comprises of 24 chapters by experts from developed and developing countries. The book cover Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Fiji, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK and England, USA, West Africa, and Zambia. © TheEditor(s) (ifapplicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, 2022.

Qualitative analysis of a community pharmacy practice transformation initiative

Objective: To evaluate practice transformation team (PTT) members' perceptions of the Flip the Pharmacy (FtP) initiative as a strategy for implementing and improving community pharmacy-based patient care. Method(s): FtP is a national 2-year practice transformation initiative for implementing enhanced patient care and medication optimization services at community pharmacies, launched in 2019 with 28 PTTs including over 500 pharmacy locations. Key informant interviews were conducted with team leads, coaches, and pharmacy champions from four PTTs that participated in the first FtP cohort. The interviews were conducted using semistructured interview guides based on the RE-AIM framework and focused on participants' experiences in the first year of FtP. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using a rapid content analysis approach. Result(s): Four leads, 8 coaches, and 8 pharmacy champions were interviewed from 4 PTTs from May to October 2021 and resulted in 10 themes: (1) community pharmacy practice experience is important when selecting coaches;(2) team readiness supports successful pharmacy practice transformation;(3) measures of patient care quality are needed;(4) payment and practice transformation opportunities happen in parallel;(5) successful practice transformation requires strategic involvement of the entire pharmacy team;(6) FtP practice transformation domains are synergistic;(7) change packages, coaching, and performance monitoring are core practice transformation supports;(8) pharmacy teams value opportunities to share and learn from each other;(9) sustaining patient care services is continuous;and (10) COVID-19 accelerated practice transformation while creating new stress points. Conclusion(s): Participants in this study perceived the FtP initiative as a helpful strategy implementing and improving community pharmacy-based patient care. Future research should explore the sustainability of the FtP initiative and similar community pharmacy practice transformation efforts.Copyright © 2022 Pharmacotherapy Publications, Inc.

Epidemiological geography at work: An exploratory review about the overall findings of spatial analysis applied to the study of CoViD-19 propagation along the first pandemic year.

The present work aims to give an overview on the international scientific papers related to the territorial spreading of SARS-CoV-2, with a specific focus upon applied quantitative geography and territorial analysis, to define a general structure for epidemiological geography research. The target publications were based on GIS spatial analysis, both in the sense of topological analysis and descriptive statistics or lato sensu geographical approaches. The first basic purpose was to organize and enhance the vast knowledge developments generated hitherto by the first pandemic that was studied "on-the-fly" all over the world. The consequent target was to investigate to what extent researchers in geography were able to draw scientifically consistent conclusions about the pandemic evolution, as well as whether wider generalizations could be reasonably claimed. This implied an analysis and a comparison of their findings. Finally, we tested what geographic approaches can say about the pandemic and whether a reliable spatial analysis routine for mapping infectious diseases could be extrapolated. We selected papers proposed for publication during 2020 and 209 articles complied with our parameters of query. The articles were divided in seven categories to enhance existing commonalities. In some cases, converging conclusions were extracted, and generalizations were derived. In other cases, contrasting or inconsistent findings were found, and possible explanations were provided. From the results of our survey, we extrapolated a routine for the production of epidemiological geography analyses, we highlighted the different steps of investigation that were attained, and we underlined the most critical nodes of the methodology. Our findings may help to point out what are the most critical conceptual challenges of epidemiological mapping, and where it might improve to engender informed conclusions and aware outcomes.

GIS MAPPING EXCESS MORTALITY IN EUROPE IN 2020–2021 ON THE BACKGROUND OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

The first officially recorded case of severe acute respiratory infection caused by SARSCoV-2 coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was reported in the People's Republic of China in late 2019. Since then, the virus has spread rapidly across the planet. On 30 January 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) designated the outbreak as an emergency and as early as 30 March 2020 it declared the disease a pandemic, named COVID-19. At the beginning of April 2022 there were more than 500 million cases and 6 million deaths according to this organization. The latter figure however immediately raised questions – among doctors and scientists alike – as it has not yet been possible to develop a uniform approach to its recording around the world. Therefore, in this paper, the choice of the excess mortality indicator is justified in its mapping presentation, whose main advantage is that it can be used to represent both the losses from COVID-19 itself and the consequences of the increased burden on public health systems. The visualization of such data using modern geo-information technology is relevant both at present, against the background of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and in the future, when dealing with its consequences. The main specificity of the territory under study – Europe (including both countries wholly located in this part of the world and parts of it – including Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkey, as well as Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Cyprus, geographically located in Asia) – is sufficient similarity of basic demographic indicators of countries with different approaches to pandemic control applied in each of them. This enables us to use maps to highlight whether they have been successful in this area in the most straightforward way. The geo-referenced mapping materials can be used for further, more in-depth analysis and visualization of coronavirus data using cartographic research at the level of individual states and their smaller jurisdictions. © 2022 Lomonosov Moscow State University. All rights reserved.

Exploring Environmental and Geographical Factors Influencing the Spread of Infectious Diseases with Interactive Maps

Environmental problems due to human activities such as deforestation, urbanisation, and large scale intensive farming are some of the major factors behind the rapid spread of many infectious diseases. This in turn poses significant challenges not only in as regards providing adequate healthcare, but also in supporting healthcare workers, medical researchers, policy makers, and others involved in managing infectious diseases. These challenges include surveillance, tracking of infections, communication of public health knowledge and promotion of behavioural change. Behind these challenges lies a complex set of factors which include not only biomedical and population health determinants but also environmental, climatic, geographic, and socioeconomic variables. While there is broad agreement that these factors are best understood when considered in conjunction, aggregating and presenting diverse information sources requires effective information systems, software tools, and data visualisation. In this article, we argue that interactive maps, which couple geographical information systems and advanced information visualisation techniques, provide a suitable unifying framework for coordinating these tasks. Therefore, we examine how interactive maps can support spatial epidemiological visualisation and modelling involving distributed and dynamic data sources and incorporating temporal aspects of disease spread. Combining spatial and temporal aspects can be crucial in such applications. We discuss these issues in the context of support for disease surveillance in remote regions, utilising tools that facilitate distributed data collection and enable multidisciplinary collaboration, while also providing support for simulation and data analysis. We show that interactive maps deployed on a combination of mobile devices and large screens can provide effective means for collection, sharing, and analysis of health data.

A 2-year pandemic period analysis of facility and county-level characteristics of nursing home coronavirus deaths in the United States, January 1, 2020-December 18, 2021.

Nursing home residents are highly susceptible to COVID-19 infection and complications. We used a generalized linear mixed Poisson model and spatial statistics to examine the determinants of COVID-19 deaths in 13,350 nursing homes in the first 2-year pandemic period using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and county-level related data. The average prevalence of COVID-19 mortality among residents was 9.02 (Interquartile range = 10.18) per 100 nursing home beds in the first 2-year of the pandemic. Fully-adjusted mixed model shows that nursing homes COVID-19 deaths reduced by 5% (Q2 versus Q1: IRR = 0.949, 95% CI 0.901- 0.999), 14.4% (Q3 versus Q1: IRR = 0.815, 95% CI 0.718 - 0.926), and 25% (Q2 versus Q1: IRR = 0.751, 95% CI 0.701- 0.805) of facility ratings. Spatial analysis showed a significant hotspot of nursing home COVID-19 deaths in the Northeast US. This study contributes to nursing home quality assessment for improving residents' health.

On the usefulness of the bioclimatic correlative models of SARS-CoV-2.

This paper addresses the effects of atmospheric conditions on the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and its associated disease, COVID-19. For this purpose, we assess the limitations of bioclimatic correlative models to explain the geographic distribution of SARS-CoV-2 in the context of medical geography. Overall, there is a broad consensus that the global distribution of COVID-19 is not random but conditioned by environmental drivers. However, as the COVID-19 distribution becomes global, including tropical climates, the evidence reveals that atmospheric conditions explain, at most, only a limited amount of the space-time dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, the usefulness of approaches based on bioclimatic envelopes is in question since the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19 seems to be the anthroposphere's non-stationary environment. In this sense, there is a need to clarify further the role of different transmission routes at multiple scales and outdoor and indoor environments beyond bioclimatic envelopes. At this time, the possible influence of the weather in COVID-19 spread is not sufficient to be taken into account in public health policies. Hence, until reliable bioclimatic envelopes of SARS-CoV-2, if any, are found, caution should be exercised when reporting, as this could have unforeseen consequences.

Fundamentally uncaring: The differential multi-scalar impacts of COVID-19 in the U.S.

2020 in the United States was marked by two converging crises-the COVID-19 pandemic and the large-scale uprisings in support of Black lives. These crises were met with both a counterproductive and inadequate response from the federal government. We examine these converging crises at the individual, social, and political scales. The biological realities of COVID-19 impact different populations in widely varied ways-the poor, the elderly, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and those living with comorbidities get sick and die at the highest rates. Social distancing guidelines shifted millions of people to work-from-home and millions more lost their jobs, even as care laborers, preponderantly women, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, were asked to put their and their loved ones' lives on the line for the continuation of all of our lives. These biological, social, and economic crises have been punctuated by civil unrest, as millions took to the streets for racial justice, noting the unequal impacts of the pandemic. These converging crises have laid bare decades of neoliberal and neoconservative policies and ideologies, undergirded as they have been by racial capitalism, for their fundamental uncaringness. In this paper, we argue that this pandemic not only made a wider population more acutely aware of the necessity and importance of the need to care and for caring labors, but also that we stand at the precipice of potentiality--of producing a more caring society. To frame our argument, we draw on Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock's (1987) framework of three bodies-individual, social, and political-to unpack the multi-scalar entanglements in the differential impacts of COVID-19, questions of care, and their articulation in the current political-economic context.

A retrospective cross-national examination of COVID-19 outbreak in 175 countries: a multiscale geographically weighted regression analysis (January 11-June 28, 2020).

OBJECTIVE: This study retrospectively examined the health and social determinants of the COVID-19 outbreak in 175 countries from a spatial epidemiological approach. METHODS: We used spatial analysis to examine the cross-national determinants of confirmed cases of COVID-19 based on the World Health Organization official COVID-19 data and the World Bank Indicators of Interest to the COVID-19 outbreak. All models controlled for COVID-19 government measures. RESULTS: The percentage of the population age between 15-64 years (Age15-64), percentage smokers (SmokTot.), and out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPExp) significantly explained global variation in the current COVID-19 outbreak in 175 countries. The percentage population age group 15-64 and out of pocket expenditure were positively associated with COVID-19. Conversely, the percentage of the total population who smoke was inversely associated with COVID-19 at the global level. CONCLUSIONS: This study is timely and could serve as a potential geospatial guide to developing public health and epidemiological surveillance programs for the outbreak in multiple countries. Removal of catastrophic medical expenditure, smoking cessation, and observing public health guidelines will not only reduce illness related to COVID-19 but also prevent unecessary deaths.