Public health interventions: the elephant in the room of the health system crisis

Since 2020, the "rules of engagement" for our health system, the expected and relatively predictable level of ill-health in the community, have changed.1 COVID-19 has increased demand for healthcare through multiple pathways. [...]through managing those acutely unwell with COVID-19 infection, which during 2022 has been a significant source of hospitalisation over the three waves. [...]by creating a large burden of "catch up" care needed for those people whose care was delayed due to beds being occupied by those infected with COVID-19. While there is common perception that pub- lic health actions take decades to have impacts, the authors of these blogs identified a wide range of interventions that would have such as vaccination, raising alcohol taxes, lowering drink driving levels, a health-based approach to drug harms, speed limit reductions, increasing benefit levels, alterations to streets to promote cycling and walking and reformulation of processed foods.12-17 These interventions would impact on a wide range of health conditions, both physical and mental.

Triggering the Splitting Dynamics of Low-Viscous Fingers throu Surface Wettability Inside Bifurcating Channel

This work presents the splitting dynamics of low-viscous fingers inside the single bifurcating channel through the surface wettability of daughter branches. The propagation of low-viscous fingers inside branching microchannels have importance in many applications, such as microfluidics, biofluid mechanics (pulmonary airway reopening), and biochemical testing. Several numerical simulations are performed where a water finger propagates inside the silicon oil-filled bifurcating channel, and at the bifurcating tip, it splits into two fmgers and these fingers propagate into the separate daughter branches. It is noticed that the behaviour of finger splitting at the bifurcating tip depends upon numerous parameters such as surface wettability, capillary number, viscosity ratio, and surface tension. This study aims to trigger the behaviour of finger splitting through the surface wettability of daughter branches (theta(1), theta(2)). Therefore, a series of numerical simulations are performed by considering four different surface wettability configurations of daughter branches, i.e., (theta(1), theta(2)) is an element of [(78 degrees, 78 degrees);(78 degrees, 118 degrees);(78 degrees, 150 degrees);(150 degrees, 150 degrees)]. According to the results obtained from numerical simulations, finger splitting may be categorized into three types based on splitting ratio (lambda), i.e., symmetrical splitting, nonsymmetrical splitting, and reversal (no) splitting. It is noticed that the surface wettability of both daughter branches is either hydrophilic (78 degrees, 78 degrees) or superhydrophobic (150 degrees, 150 degrees), providing symmetrical splitting. The surface wettability of one of the daughter branches is hydrophilic and another is hydrophobic (78 degrees, 118 degrees), providing nonsymmetrical splitting. The surface wettability of one of the daughter branches is hydrophilic and another is superhydrophobic (78 degrees, 150 degrees), providing reversal splitting. The findings of this investigation may be incorporated in the fields of biochemical testing and occulted pulmonary airways reopening as well as respiratory diseases such as COVID-19.