ABSTRACT
In late 2019, an epidemic of SARS-CoV-2 broke out in central China. Within a few months, this new virus had spread right across the globe, officially being classified as a pandemic on 11 March 2020. In France, which was also being affected by the virus, the government applied specific epidemiological management strategies and introduced unprecedented public health measures. This article describes the outbreak management system that was applied within the French military and, more specifically, analyzes an outbreak of COVID-19 that occurred on board a nuclear aircraft carrier. We applied the AcciMap systemic analysis approach to understand the course of events that led to the outbreak and identify the relevant human and organizational failures. Results highlight causal factors at several levels of the outbreak management system. They reveal problems with the benchmarks used for diagnosis and decision-making, and underscore the importance of good communication between different levels. We discuss ways of improving epidemiological management in military context.
ABSTRACT
Decision-making during critical outbreak management may require standard strategies, but also more creative ones. Our goal was to characterize the expert decision processes that take place during critical situations, where rule-based strategies and usual procedures cannot be satisfactorily applied. More specifically, we focused on the strategies experts use to deal with epidemiological problems, depending on the complexity of the situation. To this end, we carried out a simulated outbreak alert, to place two experts in a situation of epidemiological problem management, based on usual practice but also conducive to implementing creative solutions. To analyze the data, we considered not only the relevance of the solutions proposed by the experts, but also the four creativity criteria defined by Torrance (fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality). Results allowed us to identify similarities but also differences between the solutions proposed by the experts, depending on their level of experience in this area.
