Day: June 29, 2022

Posted on

New ICUs set to open at hospitals across Lesotho

Maseru – Critical care patients in Lesotho will soon be spared a trip to South Africa to receive treatment. The country is on the verge of opening its first intensive care units in public hospitals.

At Mafeteng Hospital in southwestern Lesotho, an eight-bed intensive care unit will feature a ventilator with piped oxygen and can accommodate a dedicated wing for COVID-19 patients. An oxygen plant is also on-site. The plant and oxygen supply is set to lower the cost of oxygen by up to 50%.

World Health Organization (WHO) has been training the doctors and nurses who will operate the new unit, which was funded by the World Bank. Five Ministry of Health staff, two doctors and three nurses, have been receiving training in admission criteria, oxygen therapy, high flow therapy, invasive mechanical ventilation, non-invasive mechanical ventilation, drugs management and COVID-19 critical and severe case management. They will become WHO-certified trainers themselves as the intensive care unit project expands.

“The trainings are theoretical and practical, using the material available in the hospital,” said Dr Raul Gonzalez Rodriguez, one of the trainers from the WHO Regional Office for Africa’s Case Management team.

Medical officer at Mafeteng Hospital, Dr Senate Mathaha, said the new unit would alleviate the care burden of trauma, diabetes, obstetric complications, HIV-related complications and now COVID-19.

“Taking care of ICU patients requires a lot of special skills on top of dedication and meticulous attention to detail,” she said, mentioning among them central line insertion, intubation, and operating machines like infusion pumps and ventilators.

“Hopefully after all the ICU needs have been met and there has been continued training for the staff, we will be able to care for critical patients,” she added.

At Berea Hospital in the north of the country, nurse and midwife Sello Ramakanate noted the improvements a new intensive care unit will bring for treatment of traumatic brain injuries, which are common in the area.

“Because of the mountainous terrain, and the use of donkeys and horses as modes of transport, the incidence of traumatic brain injuries is high. With limited access to health facilities, there is a relatively high occurrence of maternal and child related emergencies and some end up as deaths due to lack of critical care skills for the obstetric patients,” he said. “The use of alcohol and violence are also rife in Lesotho, particularly in areas where emergency care is limited and there is no capacity for intensive care. Life-threatening blood loss, head injuries and other conditions are prevalent, and some patients die because of the lack of a critical care unit.”

More ICU beds planned across Lesotho

Dr Francis Mupeta, a COVID-19 case management consultant for WHO in Lesotho, pointed out that there is a need for more ICU beds, as the country relied on South Africa for treatment in some cases.

“Critical patients would be evacuated to South Africa. I think the coming of COVID-19, and the lockdowns when South Africa was overwhelmed with critically-ill patients, exposed weaknesses in Lesotho’s healthcare. This ICU project is a step in the right direction in ensuring that critical care is paid attention to,” he said.

Dr Mupeta said the ICU project began when the government of Lesotho began to tackle the issues of increasing the capacity to treat critically-ill COVID-19 patients and reducing mortality due to COVID-19. A countrywide assessment, including the level of capacity for ICUs, identified only ten beds at private facility, which was prohibitively expensive for most of the population.

The project aims to increase intensive care unit beds to 36, located at various hospitals across the country, adding five to 10 beds per year.

Dr Pheello Ishmael Mobe, a General Practitioner at Berea Hospital and a trainee in this programme, said more skills development would be needed for the journey ahead.

“The more training we get, the better we will become at critical care. Through the experience of this training, when the ICU opens, we will be able to do mechanical ventilation. I hope with time our skills will get better to care for critical patients. Ultimately, Lesotho will benefit when the country is able to train more of its own specialists,” he said.

Dr Richard Banda, WHO Representative in Lesotho, said that COVID-19 has highlighted the gap in the treatment of the severe forms of the different diseases.

“ICUs are not only about COVID-19. ICU is about severity of the illness. All illnesses can develop into severe forms, and a universal health system should account for this. We will continue to work with our partners to close those gaps for a more equitable health system,” he said.

Source: World Health Organization

Posted on

Scientists’ Model Uses Google Search Data to Forecast COVID Hospitalizations

Future waves of COVID-19 might be predicted using internet search data, according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

In the study, researchers watched the number of COVID-related Google searches made across the country and used that information, together with conventional COVID-19 metrics such as confirmed cases, to predict hospital admission rates weeks in advance.

Using the search data provided by Google Trends, scientists were able to build a computational model to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations. Google Trends is an online portal that provides data on Google search volumes in real time.

“If you have a bunch of people searching for ‘COVID testing sites near me’ … you’re going to still feel the effects of that downstream at the hospital level in terms of admissions,” said data scientist Philip Turk of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. “That gives health care administrators and leaders advance warning to prepare for surges — to stock up on personal protective equipment and staffing and to anticipate a surge coming at them.”

For predictions one or two weeks in advance, the new computer model stacks up well against existing ones. It beats the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “national ensemble” forecast, which combines models made by many research teams — though there are some single models that outperform it.

Different perspective

According to study co-author Shihao Yang, a data scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the new model’s value is its unique perspective — a data source that is independent of conventional metrics. Yang is working to add the new model to the CDC’s COVID-19 forecasting hub.

Watching trends in how often people Google certain terms, like “cough” or “COVID-19 vaccine,” could help fill in the gaps in places with sparse testing or weak health care systems.

Yang also thinks that his model will be especially useful when new variants pop up. It did a good job of predicting spikes in hospitalizations thought to be associated with new variants such as omicron, without the time delays typical of many other models.

“It’s like an earthquake,” Yang said. “Google search will tell me a few hours ahead that a tsunami is hitting. … A few hours is enough for me to get prepared, allocate resources and inform my staff. I think that’s the information that we are providing here. It’s that window from the earthquake to when the tsunami hit the shore where my model really shines.”

The model considers Google search volumes for 256 COVID-19-specific terms, such as “loss of taste,” “COVID-19 vaccine” and “cough,” together with core statistics like case counts and vaccination rates. It also has temporal and spatial components — terms representing the delay between today’s data and the future hospitalizations it predicts, and how closely connected different states are.

Every week, the model retrains itself using the past 56 days’ worth of data. This keeps the model from being weighed down by older data that don’t reflect how the virus acts now.

Turk previously developed a different model to predict COVID-19 hospitalizations on a local level for the Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan area. The new model developed by Yang and his colleagues uses a different method and is the first to make state- and national-level predictions using search data.

Turk was surprised by “just how harmonious” the result was with his earlier work.

“I mean, they’re basically looking at two different models, two different paths,” he said. “It’s a great example of science coming together.”

Using Google search data to make public health forecasts has downsides. For one, Google could stop allowing researchers to use the data at any time, something Yang admits is concerning to his colleagues.

‘Noise’ in searches

Additionally, search data are messy, with lots of random behavior that researchers call “noise,” and the quality varies regionally, so the information needs to be smoothed out during analysis using statistical methods.

Local linguistic quirks can introduce problems because people from different regions sometimes use different words to describe the same thing, as can media coverage when it either raises or calms pandemic fears, Yang said. Privacy protections also introduce complications — user data are aggregated and injected with extra noise before publishing, a protection that makes it impossible to fish out individual users’ information from the public dataset.

Running the model with search data alone didn’t work as well as the model with search data and conventional metrics. Taking out search data and using only conventional COVID-19 metrics to make predictions also hurt the new model’s performance. This indicates that, for this model, the magic is in the mix — both conventional COVID-19 metrics and Google Trends data contain information that is useful for predicting hospitalizations.

“The fact that the data is valuable, and [the] data [is] difficult to process are two independent questions. There [is] information in there,” Yang said. “I can talk to my mom about this. It’s very simple, just intuitive. … If we are able to capture that intuition, I think that’s what makes things work.”

Source: Voice of America

Posted on

Pfizer Signs New $3.2B Covid Vaccine Deal With US Government

Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech said on Wednesday they signed a $3.2 billion deal with the U.S. government for 105 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine, which could be delivered as soon as later this summer.

The deal includes supplies of a retooled omicron-adapted vaccine, pending regulatory clearance, according to Pfizer.

Drugmakers have been developing vaccines to target the omicron variant that became dominant last winter.

The average price per dose in the new deal is over $30, a more than 50% increase from the $19.50 per dose the U.S. government paid in its initial contract with Pfizer.

Some of the vaccine earmarked for adults included in the contract will be in single-dose vials, which are more expensive to manufacture but reduce waste of unused shots from open vials.

“We look forward to taking delivery of these new variant-specific vaccines and working with state and local health departments, pharmacies, healthcare providers, federally qualified health centers, and other partners to make them available in communities around the country this fall,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services official Dawn O’Connell said in a statement.

Advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday recommended a change in the design of COVID-19 booster shots for this fall in order to combat more recently circulating variants of the coronavirus.

The U.S. government also has the option to purchase up to 195 million additional doses, bringing the total number of potential doses to 300 million, the companies said.

The new contract should boost 2022 vaccine sales for Pfizer and BioNTech, which share profits from the shots. Pfizer has forecast COVID-19 vaccine sales of $32 billion this year. Analysts, on average, have forecast 2022 sales of around $33.6 billion for the shots.

The U.S. government has distributed close to 450 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the United States since it was first authorized in December 2020, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 350 million of those doses have been administered.

Because the Biden administration was unable to line up more COVID-19 funding from Congress earlier this month, it was forced to reallocate $10 billion of existing funding to pay for additional vaccines and treatments.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the money to pay for doses in this new contract comes from that funding.

Source: Voice of America