Developing Modern Agent Technologies in Combating Covid-19 Exposure: An Application in a Healthcare Facility

This study aims to identify the impact of adherence to Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) such as facemask type Cotton Fabric Mask and social distancing on the rate of COVID-19 exposure in waiting areas inside an emergency department. As a methodology, a Multi-Agent Simulation approach was used to model and capture the flow of patients inside the emergency department in this research. Each agent represents a physical entity, including its attributes defined. These agents will collaborate based on the defined rules to achieve the best mimic of the system being modeled. This methodology aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of preventive measures based on the agent's proximity and exposure time. The number of infections was affected by the application of the facemask. Infections were reduced when facemask adherence and social distancing were applied. The study showed that the application of social distancing has a similar effect to a 20% adherence of agents wearing a facemask. The model also reveals that more agents adhere to the facemask, and the time required to get an agent to the state exposed increases. Waiting areas are a potentially significant contributor to transmission. © 2022 IEEE.

The Risk Status of Waiting Areas for Airborne Infection Control in Delhi Hospitals.

Background Hospital waiting areas are overlooked from the airborne infection control viewpoint as they are not classified as critical for infection control. This is the area where undiagnosed and potentially infected patients gather with susceptible and vulnerable patients, and there is no mechanism to segregate the two, especially when the potentially infected visitors/patients themselves are unaware of the infection or may be asymptomatic. It is important to know whether hospitals in Delhi, a populated, low-resource setting having community transmission/occurrence of airborne diseases such as tuberculosis, consider waiting areas as critical. Hence, this study aims to determine whether hospitals in Delhi consider waiting areas as critical areas from the airborne infection control viewpoint. Methodology The Right to Information Act, 2005, was used to request information from 11 hospitals included in this study. Results After compiling the results, it was found that five out of the 11 hospitals did not consider waiting areas as critical from the infection spread point of view. Two of the 11 hospitals acknowledged the criticality of waiting areas but did not include the same in the list of critical areas. Only three out of the 11 considered waiting areas as critical and included these in the list of critical areas in a hospital. Conclusions This study provided evidence that most hospitals in Delhi do not include waiting areas in the list of critical areas in a hospital.