The impact of COVID-19 on the importance and use of public parks in Saudi Arabia

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected people's interaction with their urban environment. This study aims to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people's experience of using public parks. The study considered the pandemic's impact on awareness of the importance of these parks and the associated use rates, duration and patterns taking Dammam City in Saudi Arabia as a case study in this regard, where improving the provision and utilisation of public parks tops the urban development agenda. The study adopted a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach, using participatory observation and questionnaire surveys. The study found that the COVID-19 pandemic has improved awareness of the importance of public parks in daily life, reflected in visit rates and duration. Some observable changes in people's use patterns in these spaces emerged in this context, as they expressed greater preference for pursuing physical activities in the post-pandemic period.

Mental health outcomes in health care providers during the COVID-19 pandemic: an umbrella review.

As we head into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increasing need to consider the long-term mental health outcomes of health care workers (HCWs) who have experienced overwhelming work pressure, economic and social deprivation, burnout, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This scoping umbrella review summarizes the mental health outcomes of published evidence syntheses on HCWs worldwide. We analyzed 39 evidence syntheses representing the findings from 1297 primary studies. We found several persistent fears and concerns (job-related fears, fear of stigmatization, worries about the pandemic, and infection-related fears) that shaped HCW experiences in delivering health care. We also describe several risk factors (job-related, social factors, poor physical and mental health, and inadequate coping strategies) and protective factors (individual and external factors). This is the first scoping umbrella review comprehensively documenting the various risk and protective factors that HCWs have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. HCWs continue to fear the risk that they may infect their family and friends since they regularly interact with COVID-19 patients. This places HCWs in a precarious situation requiring them to balance risk to their family and friends and potential social deprivation from isolation.

This review summarizes the mental health outcomes of health care workers (HCWs) during the COVID-19 pandemic, including their worries and concerns. The fear of infecting loved ones was one of the essential fears faced by HCWs. Job-related fears included job instability, career uncertainty, the fear of losing control in the workplace, and increased workload. Furthermore, HCWs expressed concerns about stigmatization and uncertainty associated with the pandemic's magnitude, duration, and effects. Several risk factors and protective factors for the mental health of HCWs were identified in this review. Risk factors included the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), the increased workload, the lack of timely information regarding the pandemic, involuntary conscription, social restrictions, pre-existing physical and mental illnesses, and improper coping strategies. In contrast, protective factors included personal characteristics such as altruism and humor, perceived control and self-efficacy, adequate training and education regarding the pandemic, adequate supply of PPE, and favorable work environments. These findings can serve as a basis for the formulation of interventions by governing bodies that promote the mental health of HCWs.

Differences in Palliative Care Provision by Primary and Specialist Providers Supporting Patients with COVID-19: A Qualitative Study.

Objectives: To describe the delivery of palliative care by primary providers (PP) and specialist providers (SP) to hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Methods: PP and SP completed interviews about their experiences providing palliative care. Results were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: Twenty-one physicians (11 SP, 10 PP) were interviewed. Six thematic categories emerged. Care provision: PP and SP described their support of care discussions, symptom management, managing end of life, and care withdrawal. Patients provided care: PP described patients at end of life, with comfort-focused goals; SP included patients seeking life-prolonging treatments. Approach to symptom management: SP described comfort, and PP discomfort in providing opioids with survival-focused goals. Goals of care: SP felt these conversations were code status-focused. Supporting family: both groups indicated difficulties engaging families due to visitor restrictions; SP also outlined challenges in managing family grief and need to advocate for family at the bedside. Care coordination: internist PP and SP described difficulties supporting those leaving the hospital. Conclusion: PP and SP may have a different approach to care, which may affect consistency and quality of care.

Pandemic response strategies and threshold phenomena.

This paper critically evaluates the Suppression Threshold Strategy (STS) for controlling Covid-19 (C-19). STS asserts a "fundamental distinction" between suppression and mitigation strategies, reflected in very different outcomes in eventual mortality depending on whether reproductive number R is caused to fall below 1. We show that there is no real distinction based on any value of R which falls in any case from early on in an epidemic wave. We show that actual mortality outcomes lay on a continuum, correlating with suppression levels, but not exhibiting any step changes or threshold effects. We argue that an excessive focus on achieving suppression at all costs, driven by the erroneous notion that suppression is a threshold, led to a lack of information on how to trade off the effects of different specific interventions. This led many countries to continue with inappropriate intervention-packages even after it became clear that their initial goal was not going to be attained. Future pandemic planning must support the design of "Plan B", which may be quite different from "Plan A".

Palliative Care and Hospice in the Pandemic: A Review of State Planning and Lessons Not Yet Learned.

CONTEXT: Written Crisis Standards of Care guidelines have been published federally in the United States for several decades to assisted in planning for a variety of disasters, and planning documents exist in most states. Federal and state crisis planning guidelines, both before and during the early COVID pandemic, focused on saving the most lives. Palliative care (PC) and hospice shortages were exacerbated by the COVID pandemic but recognized late and incompletely. OBJECTIVES: 1) Quantify the number of state crisis standard planning documents that include recognition of potential PC and hospice crisis needs in a pandemic. 2) Assess the range of practical plans in existing state Crisis Standards of Care plans. 3) Outline elements of recommendations from existing guidelines and literature. METHODS: Internet searches for state-based "crisis standards of care" completed and results categorized regarding PC and hospice planning as: 1) absent, 2) mentioned only in relation to critical care triage, 3) described only in general principles, 4) describing potential concrete plans to address PC and hospice needs. RESULTS: Of the 50 states and Washington, DC, 45 states have electronically available "crisis standards of care" or emergency preparedness documents; 35 of these were written or updated since 2020. Only 20 states mention any concrete aspects of planning for potential palliative care or hospice service shortages. Guidelines most often involved alternate care sites, protective equipment, and specialist resources. Visitation policy was rarely mentioned. CONCLUSIONS: Concrete planning for PC and hospice needs in state crisis planning occurs in less than half of state documents, even three years after the start of this pandemic. Failure to address these needs will result in avoidable suffering for patients in a wide range of settings. It is important to identify and address gaps before the next disaster.

ISSUES AND WAY FORWARD FOR THE SMART SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND COMMUNITIES STANDARDS: THE MALAYSIAN CASE IN THE POST-COVID-19 ERA

Governing a city's development with the use of standards started relatively recently, in the mid-2010s. However, the issues of such city standards in systematically governing future smart cities remains largely unknown under the digital infrastructural stress of the post-COVID-19 era. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the issues and directions in developing the Malaysian smart sustainable cities and communities standards that suit the post-COVID-19 era. This study applied the multiple case study method to compare the international literatures and the local smart city webinars. The results showed that smart city standards were welcomed by policymakers and practitioners, although issues such as learning, connectivity, and citizenship rationale need to be addressed. More focus should be put on how humans relearn and responsibly participate in the post-COVID-19 cyber-physical ecosystem in order to create a healthy and sustainable digital-based society. This paper has contributed as one of the first researches examining the role of smart city standards in Malaysia. © 2022 by MIP.

Dialysis network during Covid: structural perspectives.

Risk profile of dialysis people as regards Covid 19 pandemic is unique;they stay together for some hours in an open-space, sharing transport before and after treatment as a shuttle between families and dialysis centre. As demonstrated by the waves of pandemic, isolation becomes more and more difficult, especially in centres lacking pathways and spaces devoted to contaminated patients. In our setting, dialysis centres were born as marginal areas, discarded from other uses and their design was seldom addressed to out-patients treatment. Logistic and preventive needs (spaces, distances, pathways) were often laid down to a social vision of dialysis. We describe our immediate response to adapt a network of public dialysis centres to pandemic. These measures, and the dedication of our personnel, resulted in a very low mortality rate, but we are still reporting a progressive increase of Covid patients. Organizational response becomes useless without structural changes. We therefore propose a plan oriented to transform dialysis centres into dynamic and safe places of care. Since other pandemics are expected in the future, it appears mandatory to redirect our choices towards a more conservative approach in designing a dialysis point of care, resembling the isolated pavilions of older hospital buildings. Separate entries and exits, mobile walls and large waiting rooms are needed;some personnel redundancy will be required in spite of lean management principles, strongly disproved by Covid. Dialysis rebuilding will be an extraordinary opportunity to create a sustainable way of treatment.Copyright © 2022 The Authors.

Analysis of Quality Management and Sustainability in Sports Services During the Covid-19 Pandemic

With the arrival of the pandemic, the management of sports services was affected, and the sports infrastructure closed its doors to the community in general, which has produced great losses in material resources;therefore, the objective of the study was to determine the difficulties and benefits offered by post-pandemic sports services, through the application of a test of perceived quality in sports services in the province of Cotopaxi. Within the methodology used, qualitative–quantitative research stands out, with exploratory-descriptive levels in a sample of 125 users of sports centers;the results obtained drive the strengthening of sports spaces towards the provision of quality services, even more since it is necessary for the human being to have a strengthened immune system through the practice of physical activities, it is concluded that quality sports services depend directly on the budget allocated for an adequate sport management for the benefit of the community. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

A Systematic Map of Non-Clinical Evidence Syntheses Published Globally on COVID-19.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: Evidence syntheses perform rigorous investigations of the primary literature and they have played a vital role in generating evidence-based recommendations for governments worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there has not yet been an attempt to organize them by topic and other characteristics. This study performed a systematic mapping exercise of non-clinical evidence syntheses pertaining to Covid-19. METHODS: This study conducted a systematic search on December 5, 2020 across 10 databases and servers: CINAHL (EBSCO Information Services, Ipswich, Massachusetts, United States), Embase (Elsevier, Aalborg, Denmark), Global Health (EBSCO Information Services, Ipswich, Massachusetts, United States), Healthstar (NICHSR and AHA, Bethesda, United States), MEDLINE (NLM, Bethesda, United States), PsychINFO (APA, Washington, DC, United States), Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics, London, UK), Research Square (Research Square, Durham, North Carolina), MEDRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, United States), and PROSPERO (NIHR, York, United Kingdom). Only full evidence syntheses published in a peer-reviewed journal or preprint server were included. RESULTS: This study classified all evidence syntheses in the following topics: health service delivery (n = 280), prevention and behavior (n = 201), mental health (n = 140), social epidemiology (n = 31), economy (n = 22), and environment (n = 19). This study provides a comprehensive resource of all evidence syntheses categorized according to topic. CONCLUSIONS: This study proposes the following research priorities: governance, the impact of Covid-19 on different populations, the effectiveness of prevention and control methods across contexts, mental health, and vaccine hesitancy.

TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT OF COVID 19 PANDEMIC ON THE URBAN PUBLIC SPACES

Urban areas attract population influx due to central economic, social, and technological growth. However, living in the city comes with an undesirable cost due to the scarcity of land area. People are forced to live in smaller housing without personal open space and lawns. Future urban population will opt for small living spaces and indirectly increase the need for public open spaces. Unfortunately, the Covid 19 pandemic outbreaks in 2020 have forced the urban community to be confined to their own home later negatively impacting the urban population's physical and mental health. This research aims to identify the possible long-term transformative impact of the covid 19 pandemic from the space and user context. Two types of approaches were adopted by the research, the Systematic Literature Review using the PRISMA method, and the questionnaire survey analysed using SPSS. The findings from SLR are coded and categorised into three themes: transformative impact on user behaviour and perception, the planning and design of space, and the Social-Political impact. Next, the survey was developed based on the themes of transformative impact. One of the most important conclusions is that the urban public space provision and accessibility vary according to the socioeconomic background of the community. By understanding the possible transformative impact of pandemics on urban public space, better policy and guidelines for planning and managing the public space can be made where the urban public space can be fully utilised, functional safely and conveniently and accessible for all in the post-pandemic era. © 2022 by MIP.

Rural Home Care Nursing During COVID-19.

BACKGROUND: The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to be a challenging time for the nursing profession globally. Research indicates that the care of patients with COVID-19 has caused significant psychological stress for nurses. Although much of the world's attention has been on nurses working in emergency departments and intensive care units, the pandemic also posed significant challenges for nurses providing home care services in rural communities. PURPOSE: The purpose of this work was to describe the experiences of rural Canadian home care nurses during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: The data for this analysis was derived from a study that explored the continuing education needs of rural home care nurses. Since the data collection for the primary objective occurred in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 related themes were created using interpretive description methodology. Snowball and purposive sampling were used to recruit rural home care registered nurses who were employed in the central and southern areas of a western Canadian province. RESULTS: Six themes were constructed from the data including: Nurses Must Work, Constant State of Flux, Threatened Safety, Loss of Learning Opportunities, Fearing the Unknown, and Hindsight is Easy. CONCLUSION: The experiences of rural home care nurses during COVID-19 reflects the chaos, uncertainty, and fear that was felt globally. Based on the findings of this study, recommendations for future pandemic planning are suggested.

Epidemiological disaster management: Literature survey and analysis

Epidemiological disasters can cause significant suffering and change lives, but how they are handled can have just as much of an impact. This research aims to shed light on epidemiological disaster management literature from multidisciplinary perspectives and analyze its development and trends. A total of 365 scholarly articles were analyzed for this study using a number of databases from various academic disciplines. Search Keywords included "pandemic disaster management,” "pandemic planning,” "pandemic preparedness,” "pandemic response,” and "pandemic recovery.” Consequently, this paper surveys the literature and presents a brief background on epidemiological disasters and their management, a descriptive and inferential analysis of studies on the subject matter, a discussion of relevant issues, and suggested potential research directions for those interested. The analysis reveals that traditional methods for managing epidemiological disasters primarily rely on medical principles and policies, with medical sciences accounting for the great majority of studies, followed by social sciences. Moreover, the majority of the research has focused on response and preparedness, while recovery has gotten relatively little attention in favor of these earlier phases. Accordingly, based on various strategies/approaches exploited by different countries to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the trend of the existing body of research identified in this study, a paradigm shift in epidemiological disaster management is inevitable. © 2023 by the author.

Informing COVID-19 Response and Health Equity Agenda: Collection of Public Health Reports Articles on Emerging Viral Epidemics in the United States, 1878-2021.

OBJECTIVE: Public Health Reports (PHR) is the oldest public health journal in the United States and has reported on viral epidemics since the 19th century. We describe the creation and analysis of a collection of historic PHR articles on emerging viral epidemics in the United States to inform public health response to COVID-19 and future epidemics. METHODS: We searched databases from 1878 through 2021 using custom search strings and conducted a manual search for articles published under previously used names for PHR. We evaluated all articles based on inclusion/exclusion criteria and coded the final list for virus/disease, article type, public health emergency preparedness and response capabilities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and PubMed citation count. RESULTS: We identified 349 relevant articles including 130 commentaries/reviews/editorials, 79 epidemiologic reports, 75 research articles, and 65 case study/practice articles. The collection focused on influenza (n = 244), COVID-19 (n = 75), dengue (n = 14), and other emerging viruses, such as Zika and Ebola (n = 25). The collection included 48 articles on health disparities/health of various disadvantaged populations, highlighting such disparities as race and ethnicity (n = 22), socioeconomic status (n = 17), and age (n = 15). When we categorized articles by CDC public health emergency preparedness and response capabilities, we found that 207 addressed surveillance and epidemiologic investigation, 36 addressed community preparedness, and 28 addressed medical countermeasure dispensing and administration. The articles addressing surveillance and epidemiologic investigation, nonpharmaceutical interventions, and community preparedness had the most PubMed citations (799, 334, and 308, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: PHR's historic articles on US emerging viral epidemics covered a range of virus/disease types, emergency preparedness and response capabilities, and contribution types and were widely cited in the scholarly literature. This publicly available and continuously updated collection is a valuable resource for pandemic planning and response.

Epidemiological disaster management: Literature survey and analysis

Epidemiological disasters can cause significant suffering and change lives, but how they are handled can have just as much of an impact. This research aims to shed light on epidemiological disaster management literature from multidisciplinary perspectives and analyze its development and trends. A total of 365 scholarly articles were analyzed for this study using a number of databases from various academic disciplines. Search Keywords included "pandemic disaster management,” "pandemic planning,” "pandemic preparedness,” "pandemic response,” and "pandemic recovery.” Consequently, this paper surveys the literature and presents a brief background on epidemiological disasters and their management, a descriptive and inferential analysis of studies on the subject matter, a discussion of relevant issues, and suggested potential research directions for those interested. The analysis reveals that traditional methods for managing epidemiological disasters primarily rely on medical principles and policies, with medical sciences accounting for the great majority of studies, followed by social sciences. Moreover, the majority of the research has focused on response and preparedness, while recovery has gotten relatively little attention in favor of these earlier phases. Accordingly, based on various strategies/approaches exploited by different countries to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the trend of the existing body of research identified in this study, a paradigm shift in epidemiological disaster management is inevitable. © 2023 by the author.

Data-Driven Modeling and Analysis for COVID-19 Pandemic Hospital Beds Planning

The COVID-19 pandemic presents unprecedented challenges for the US healthcare system, and the critical care settings are heavily impacted by the pressures of caring for COVID-19 patients. However, hospital pandemic preparedness has been hampered by a lack of disease specific planning guidelines. In this paper, we proposed a holistic modeling and analysis approach, with a system dynamics model to predict COVID-19 cases and a discrete-event simulation to evaluate hospital bed utilization, to support the hospital planning decisions. Our model was trained using the public data from the JHU Coronavirus Resource Center and was validated using historical patient census data from the University of Florida Health Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL and public data from the Florida Department of Health (FDOH). Various experiments were conducted to investigate different control measures and the variants of the virus and their impact on the disease transmission, and subsequently, the hospital planning needs. Our proposed approach can be tailored to a given hospital setting of interest and is also generalizable to other hospitals to tackle the pandemic planning challenge. Note to Practitioners-We proposed a holistic modeling and analysis approach to support hospital preparedness and resource planning during the COVID-19 pandemic. To capture the highly dynamic pandemic environment, we developed a numerical method to estimate R-0, the effective basic reproductive rate, and used the most recent estimated data series of daily R-0 to project the change in R-0 in a short-term forecast window. The prediction of the daily confirmed cases in that forecast window were then obtained based on recursively solving the system dynamics model, and was validated to be very close to the real confirmed cases from the public record. This data-driven approach allows us to gain a systematic understanding of the common trends across different states and regions, and to evaluate the effect of the control measures like the stay-at-home order and the impact of the virus variants on the disease transmission behavior. Furthermore, the dynamic prediction allows us to evaluate the hospital resource needs during different stages of the pandemic. The insights obtained through this effort shed light on the impact of interventions (e.g., vaccines and control measures) on the hospital preparedness to support appropriate hospital resource allocation.

Rethinking urban green spaces for urban resilience. Do green spaces need adaptation to meet public post-covid expectations?

Based on a social preference survey performed in Warsaw, we assessed the preferences toward alterations in urban green spaces (UGS) that should take place to ensure safe recreation. We identified how peoples' personal characteristics are linked to the preferred changes to formulate recommendations for alterations addressing post-covid challenges while keeping the resident's preferences in mind. We used 1–7 scorings of images of different types of urban landscapes, which we photomanipulated to represent varying levels of crowding, followed by questions regarding recreational behaviour, anxiety towards COVID and preferred changes. Various urban landscapes were, on average, comparably suitable for recreation, only highly urbanized landscapes receiving lower scorings. The respondents declared that vegetation density and overall share of vegetation were of the highest importance in assessing images and claimed that crowding had little effect on their preferences. Those statements were inverse to their choices when assessing recreational preferences based on images: the presence of people in all cases decreased assessment of the scenery. There was a clear respondents' need for more wild and cultivated vegetation and more places for spending time in UGS. Any repressive actions by distancing people spatially in UGS, isolating seniors or introducing entry limits did not meet social approval. We also identified two major behavioural patterns: people who were primarily driven by fear of COVID-19, visiting green spaces closer to their homes and having less need for UGS alterations. The second group was those frequently visiting UGS who did not reveal fear of COVID-19, those who did not favour wide paths or the importance of UGS located nearby, and opted for more wilderness. These two approaches to recreation are likely to persist after the pandemic, which supports the need to increase UGS diversity.

Relationships are everything: The underpinnings of grassroots community action in the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto.

Most government emergency/pandemic response plans feature top-down decision making and communication strategies and a focus on 'hard' (physical) infrastructure. There is nothing about the importance of the ideas and communications originating from communities, the social infrastructure that supports their impact locally and their contribution to the central administration. In this study, we found that the 'soft' (social) infrastructure within communities and between communities and formal institutions is key to an inclusive and more equitable response to large-scale crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots leaders in six Toronto neighbourhoods were interviewed between the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto about what helped or hindered community action. Three themes emerged: (1) Grassroots leaders and community organizations were able to act as key connection points in a two-way flow of information and resources with residents and service providers; (2) Grassroots leaders and groups were challenged to engage in this work in a sustained capacity without adequate resourcing; and (3) there was a disconnect between community-centred grassroots approaches and the City's emergency response. We conclude that there needs to be pre-disaster investment in community level planning and preparation that fosters two-way connections between all municipal emergency/disaster and pandemic preparedness plans and community-centred organizations and grassroots leaders working in marginalized communities.

Urban Issues During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Jordan: Case Study of Amman City

Urban planning has always reflected the major crises and technological developments. Throughout history, the most noteworthy advancements and innovations in urban planning have occurred in reaction to serious public health pandemics. The Covid-19 pandemic affected our negligent strategy to resilience in urban planning. The Covid-19 outbreak has touched everyone internationally and has caused us to rethink our lifestyle. This current crisis sheds new light on a number of challenges regarding urban planning. The Covid-19 pandemic has the potential to significantly change urban planning and the existing way of living. This situation demands understanding the obstacles faced, the mistakes, and the undiscovered opportunities in order to allow the construction of epidemic resilient communities. Therefore, this research is set out to investigate the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on urban planning. Taking into consideration several problems brought by the crisis, with an emphasis on the urban planning context and the changes taking place in the planning sector, this study followed the case study approach focusing on Amman – the capital city of Jordan. Urban planning in Amman has witnessed many spatial planning issues during the recent pandemic. Results indicated that we should rethink the current urban design and planning strategies to bring forth a new phase of sustainable and resilient urban cities which will enhance resilience to emerging future disease outbreaks.

Crowdsourcing homemade facemasks: 772 U.S. health facilities' responses to personal protective equipment shortages in the first half of 2020.

PURPOSE: We examined 772 U.S. health facilities' responses to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) shortages in the first half of 2020, as they crowdsourced face coverings from volunteer makers to be used as respiratory protection during crisis surge capacity. The purpose was to examine facemask specification requests from health facilities and develop a framework for crowdsourcing last resort PPE. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Homemade facemask donation requests from health facilities in 47 states systematically recorded in a public database maintained by public health graduate students at a major U.S. university were analysed. Open coding was used to content analyse facemask types and specifications, intended uses, delivery logistics and donation management strategies. FINDINGS: Our analysis revealed information gaps: Science-based information was scarce in 2020, leading to improvised specifications for facemask materials and designs. It also revealed the emergence of a crowdsourcing structure: Task specifications for volunteer facemasks makers, delivery logistics, and practical management of donations within the pandemic context. In anticipation of future pandemics and localised PPE shortages, we build on this empirical evidence to propose a framework for crowdsourcing science-informed facemasks from volunteers. Categorised within (a) logistics and workflow management, (b) task specifications and management, and (c) practical management of contributions functional areas, the framework outlines the required tasks and specifications for crowdsourcing. ORIGINALITY: A novel empirically derived framework for crowdsourcing homemade facemasks is proposed, based on empirical analysis and crowdsourcing system design strategies. Our findings and the framework may be used for refining crisis capacity guidelines, as part of strategic planning and preparation for future pandemics that disrupt supply chains and cause shortages in protective equipment.

Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic and How Blood Operators Can Prepare for the Next Pandemic.

Humans interact with virus-infected animal hosts, travel globally, and maintain social networks that allow for novel viruses to emerge and develop pandemic potential. There are key lessons-learned from the coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that blood operators can apply to the next pandemic. Warning signals to the COVID-19 pandemic included outbreaks of Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus-1 (SARS-CoV-1) and Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in the prior two decades. It will be critical to quickly determine whether there is a risk of blood-borne transmission of a new pandemic virus. Prior to the next pandemic blood operators should be prepared for changes in activities, policies, and procedures at all levels of the organization. Blood operators can utilize "Plan-Do-Study-Act" cycles spanning from: vigilance for emerging viruses, surveillance activities and studies, operational continuity, donor engagement and trust, and laboratory testing if required. Occupational health and donor safety issues will be key areas of focus even if the next pandemic virus is not transfusion transmitted. Blood operators may also be requested to engage in new activities such as the development of therapeutics or supporting public health surveillance activities. Activities such as scenario development, tabletop exercises, and drills will allow blood operators to prepare for the unknowns of the next pandemic.