Covid and social perspectives

 THE COVID-19 CRISIS. Social Perspectives

In Chapter 13

13 Post-pandemic Routes in the Context of Latin Countries: The Impact of COVID-19 in Italy and Spain by Anna Sendra, Jordi Farré, Alessandro Lovari and Linda Lombi

In terms of health and risk communication, the COVID crisis has emphasised the lack of specific training in crisis and emergency communication of many public sector organisations, including health institutions. This first social media pandemic has been a major challenge for health communicators; individuals often failed in effectively communicating data and numbers to counteract the infodemic and thus reduce the impact of false narratives. With the increasing diversification of social media platforms, ‘individuals’ health […] will be shaped by a multitude of social forces, each of which can mediate different kinds of health contagion processes’ (Zhang and Centola, 2019). Mitigating the spread of fake news seems to involve coordinated efforts between authorities, mass media and digital companies, but it also appears crucial to invest in education and digital literacy for developing a critical awareness of the use of digital technologies that could be useful for facing future health crises. In other words, the strengthening of comprehensive population-centred responses lies on finding answers concerning how the mechanisms of public concern will operate to engage in coherent protection rules or in what ways the forms of interaction will change

Outline of the book:

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1 COVID Society: Introduction to the Book

Deborah Lupton and Karen Willis

2. Contextualising COVID-19: Sociocultural Perspectives on Contagion

Deborah Lupton

PART II: SPACE, THE BODY AND MOBILITIES

3. Moving Target, Moving Parts: The Multiple Mobilities of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Nicola Burns, Luca Follis, Karolina Follis and Janine Morley

4. Physical Activity and Bodily Boundaries in Times of Pandemic

Holly Thorpe, Julie Brice and Marianne Clark

5. City Flows During Pandemics: Zooming in on Windows

Oimpia Mosteanu

6. The Politics of Touch-Based Help for Visually Impaired Persons During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Autoethnographic Account

Hidi Lourens

PART III: INTIMACIES, SOCIALITIES AND CONNECTIONS

7. #DatingWhileDistancing: Dating Apps as Digital Health Technologies During the COVID-19 Pandemic

David Myles, Stefanie Duguay and Christopher Dietzel

8. ‘Unhome’ Sweet Home: The Construction of New Normalities in Italy During COVID-19

Veronica Moretti and Antonio Maturo

9. Queer and Crip Temporalities During COVID-19: Sexual Practices, Risk and Responsibility

Ryan Thorneycroft and Lucy Nicholas

10. Isol-AID, Art and Wellbeing: Posthuman Community Amid COVID-19

Marissa Willcox, Anna Hickey-Moody and Anne M. Harris

PART IV: HEALTHCARE PRACTICES AND SYSTEMS

11. Strange Times in Ireland: Death and the Meaning of Loss Under COVID-19

Jo Murphy-Lawless

12. Between an Ethics of Care and Scientific Uncertainty: Dilemmas of General Practitioners in Marseille

Romain Lutaud, Jeremy K. Ward, Gaëtan Gentile and Pierre Verger

13 Post-pandemic Routes in the Context of Latin Countries: The Impact of COVID-19 in Italy and Spain

Anna Sendra, Jordi Farré, Alessandro Lovari and Linda Lombi

14. Risky Work: Providing Healthcare in the Age of COVID-19

Karen Willis and Natasha Smallwood

PART V: MARGINALISATION AND DISCRIMINATION

15. The Plight of the Parent-Citizen? Examples of Resisting (Self-)Responsibilisation and Stigmatisation by Dutch Muslim Parents and Organisations During the COVID-19 Crisis

Alex Schenkels, Sakina Loukili and Paul Mutsaers

16. Anti-Asian Racism, Xenophobia and Asian American Health During COVID-19

Aggie J. Yellow Horse

17. Ageism and Risk During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Peta S. Cook, Cassie Curryer, Susan Banks, Barbara Barbosa Neves, Maho Omori, Annetta H. Mallon and Jack Lam

The world (dis)order after COVID-19

 COVID-19 AND WORLD ORDER. THE FUTURE OF CONFLICT, COMPETITION, AND COOPERATION

A free book of interest:

Part I. Applied History and Future Scenarios

Chapter 1. Ends of Epidemics

Jeremy A. Greene and Dora Vargha

Chapter 2. The World after COVID: A Perspective from History

Margaret MacMillan

Chapter 3. Future Scenarios: "We are all failed states, now"

Philip Bobbitt

Part II. Global Public Health and Mitigation Strategies

Chapter 4. Make Pandemics Lose Their Power

Tom Inglesby

Chapter 5. Origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Path Forward: A Global Public Health Policy Perspective

Lainie Rutkow

Chapter 6. Bioethics in a Post-COVID World: Time for Future-Facing Global Health Ethics

Jeffrey P. Kahn, Anna C. Mastroianni, and Sridhar Venkatapuram

Part III. Transnational Issues: Technology, Climate, and Food

Chapter 7. Global Climate and Energy Policy after the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Tug-of-War between Markets and Politics

Johannes Urpelainen

Chapter 8. No Food Security, No World Order

Jessica Fanzo

Chapter 9. Flat No Longer: Technology in the Post-COVID World

Christine Fox and Thayer Scott

Part IV. The Future of the Global Economy

Chapter 10. Models for a Post-COVID US Foreign Economic Policy

Benn Steil

Chapter 11. Prospects for the United States' Post-COVID-19 Policies: Strengthening the G20 Leaders Process

John Lipsky

Part V. Global Politics and Governance

Chapter 12. When the World Stumbled: COVID-19 and the Failure of the International System

Anne Applebaum

Chapter 13. Public Governance and Global Politics after COVID-19

Henry Farrell and Hahrie Han

Chapter 14. Take It Off-Site: World Order and International Institutions after COVID-19

Janice Gross Stein

Chapter 15. A "Good Enough" World Order: A Gardener's Manual

James B. Steinberg

Part VI. Grand Strategy and American Statecraft

Chapter 16. Maybe It Won't Be So Bad: A Modestly Optimistic Take on COVID and World Order

Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden

Chapter 17. COVID-19's Impact on Great-Power Competition

Thomas Wright

Chapter 18. Building a More Globalized Order

Kori Schake

Chapter 19. Could the Pandemic Reshape World Order, American Security, and National Defense?

Kathleen H. Hicks

Part VII. Sino-American Rivalry

Chapter 20. The United States, China, and the Great Values Game

Elizabeth Economy

Chapter 21. The US-China Relationship after Coronavirus: Clues from History

Graham Allison

Chapter 22. Building a New Technological Relationship and Rivalry: US-China Relations in the Aftermath of COVID

Eric Schmidt

Chapter 23. From COVID War to Cold War: The New Three-Body Problem

Niall Ferguson

Vaccine diplomacy

 PREVENTING THE NEXT PANDEMIC. Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-science

Throughout modern history, vaccines have surpassed all other biotechnologies in terms of their impact on global public health. Because of vaccines, smallpox was eradicated, and polio has been driven to near global elimination, while measles deaths have declined more than 90%, and Haemophilus influenzae type b meningitis is now a disease of the past in the United States and elsewhere.

I define one part of vaccine diplomacy as a subset or specific aspect of global health diplomacy in which large-scale vaccine delivery is employed as a humanitarian intervention, often led by one or more of the UN agencies, most notably Gavi, UNICEF, and WHO, or potentially a nongovernmental development organization

 Do vaccines really deserve their own designation for a special type of diplomacy? Yes, I believe so, especially when we consider that between the past century and this one vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives [2]. In this sense, the technology of vaccines and their widespread delivery represent our most potent counterforce to war and political instability in modern times. Vaccines represent not only life-saving technologies and unparalleled instruments for reducing human suffering, but they also serve as potent vehicles for promoting international peace and prosperity. They are humankind’s single greatest invention.

The greater issue is that in each of these four cases—smallpox, polio, Ebola, and COVID-19—the global health community had to respond to a crisis and scramble to rapidly develop, test, license, and distribute these vaccines. Could we also implement an anticipatory system in which nations prioritize vaccine diplomacy and routinely employ it to improve international relations? The Global Health Security Agenda does not currently emphasize vaccine development, although new organizations like CEPI and start-up innovation funds from the Japanese and South Korean governments represent promising steps toward global vaccine diplomacy. I am an enthusiastic champion of their efforts. However, I also believe that an opportunity exists for a more comprehensive effort to tackle the world’s most prevalent poverty-related neglected diseases while simultaneously expanding international scientific cooperation as a core element.

The answer might be found somewhere in the G20...

 

Regulating AI in healthcare

 Approval of artificial intelligence and machine learning-based medical devices in the USA and Europe (2015–20): a comparative analysis

Timely article. A must read to understand current situation.

A helpful document with the current approved technologies. 

Radiology leads the ranking:

Comparison of the situation between USA and EUROPE.

Pandonomics

Pandemic Economics

Key take-aways from the final chapter:

• Pandemic preparedness starts at home.

• Firms cannot rely on bailouts and need to adjust their business

strategies to pandemic risk.

• Financial pandemic preparedness can help with other disasters

and vice versa.

• Cost-efficient adjustment and investments in preparedness

require a sustained long-term approach.

• City planning and (re)construction should be focussed on

resilience and based on citizen and community engagement.

• The organization of the access to health care facilities during

pandemics is a local task; national governments need to set

uniform standards and rules that govern access to health care.

• Governments should use the adjustment potential of the economy

and focus support on sectors that need to and can grow.

• Outbreak management teams and scientific councils that advise

governments on pandemic response need a stronger basis in all

relevant sciences.

• The nation state is only the optimal health care area in very

special cases.

• International organizations should make the assessment of

pandemic preparedness a standard element of country studies,

monitoring and surveillance.

• Pandemics have not yet received the explicit attention they need

in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

• Strengthening global governance is an elementary step in proactive

pandemic preparedness.

Allocating vaccines

 Public Perspectives on COVID-19 Vaccine Prioritization

US adults broadly agreed with the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s prioritization framework. Respondents endorsed prioritizing racial/ethnic communities that are disproportionately affected by COVID-19, and older respondents were significantly less likely than younger respondents to endorse prioritizing healthy people older than 65 years. This provides reason for caution about COVID-19 vaccine distribution plans that prioritize healthy adults older than a cutoff age without including those younger than that age with preexisting conditions, that aim solely to prevent the most deaths, or that give no priority to frontline workers or disproportionately affected communities.

Beware.

 

Parov Stelar

Conflicting views on human heritable genome editing

 Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Public Engagement Imperative

Now limited to preclinical research by a prohibitive federal statute, the conduct of HHGE in the United States may well be at the mercy of the mutable arc of public opinion, the trajectory of which is unknowable.44 Eventual public acceptance of HHGE may well follow if it can be shown to have a unique and favorable impact on the global burden of incurable genetic disease. Such a trajectory would be further buttressed by the plight of parents and their children, which is universally resonant and hard to ignore. Medical science has, after all, been down this road before. Standing in opposition to the prospect of HHGE are deep-rooted misgivings over runaway technological progress that is liable to shatter millennia-old societal norms. Additional concerns draw on the prospect of liberal eugenics, access inequities, imponderable impairment, and progeny-related harm. Reconciling the conflicting views of the current steady state will require time, perhaps generational time, before the dust settles. In the interim, it is nothing short of imperative that HHGE be subjected to the rigors of public deliberation along the lines applied to MRT and related reproductive technologies.45 What is called for is informed public judgment that has accounted for both the relevant concerns and the potential to advance human welfare.

 

Why Basque country spends in health 24% more than Catalonia?

Estadística de Gasto Sanitario Público

And why they spend 5,5% of GDP and Catalonia 4,9%?

On value (once again)

 From value for money to value-based health services: a twenty-first century shift

VBHS cannot be achieved without reorienting existing fragmented models of care towards one that rests on a strong primary health care foundation (19) with an integrated community care component and underpinned by the principle of people coproducing health. This may encompass a shift from inpatient to outpatient and ambulatory care, where appropriate. It requires investment in holistic and comprehensive care, including health promotion and prevention strategies that support people’s health and well-being (20). It further requires effective referral systems, flexible and multidisciplinary provider networks, and participatory monitoring and evaluation strategies.

Nothing new. 

Joaquim Mir

Economic evaluation of vaccination

 Evaluating Vaccination Programs That Prevent Diseases With Potentially Catastrophic Health Outcomes: How Can We Capture the Value of Risk Reduction?

Why QALYs doesn't fit for CEA of vaccination?

In the last 5 years, guidelines have been developed for performing cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) for the economic evaluation of vaccination programs against infectious diseases. However, these cost-effectiveness guidelines do not provide specific guidance for including the value of reducing the risk of rare but potentially catastrophic health outcomes, such as mortality or long-term sequelae. Alternative economic evaluation methods, including extended CEA, the impact inventory, cost-benefit analyses, willingness to pay or the value of a statistical life, to capture the value of this risk reduction could provide more complete estimates of the value of vaccination programs for diseases with potentially catastrophic health and nonhealth outcomes. In this commentary, using invasive meningococcal disease as an example, we describe these alternative approaches along with examples to illustrate how the benefits of vaccination in reducing risk of catastrophic health outcomes can be valued. These benefits are not usually captured in CEAs that only include population benefits estimated as the quality adjusted life-years gained and reduced costs from avoided cases.

 

We all require care

The Care Crisis,What Caused It and How Can We End It?

Interesting book about care and what it means, 

Care is conceived as all the supporting activities that take place to make, remake, maintain, contain and repair the world we live in and the physical, emotional and intellectual capacities required to do so.1 In this sense, care is at the heart of making and remaking the world. The propensity to care and the work of caring are the lifeblood of our social and economic system. Care is central to the reproduction of society and thus one of its bedrocks, part of a fundamental infrastructure which holds society together. Without care, life could not be sustained.

What happens to affective relations and caring activities when they are subsumed under market forces and turned into services that are sold? As ever more areas of social life and work are directly commercialised, the affective investments of care come into conflict with logics of measure, profitability, time constraints, cost reduction, standardisation, and economies of scale in multiple ways

However, instead of considering efficient ways to provide care, the political views surpass efficiency, a well known paradigm.

Valuing care means allocating resources, not taking them away. There is an urgent need to dismantle the apparatus that allows private wealth extraction from society’s care structures, so that any new funds made available for the public care infrastructures do not simply prop up profits. Care needs to be shielded from the volatilities of financial markets, not be drawn deeper into them. Therefore, the realms of care should not be available to high-risk forms of financial investment, including private equity and debt-based forms of financial engineering, where expectations of high returns on capital are upheld at the expense of quality of employment and quality of care. Nor should public services and the care sector be exposed to free trade agreements that undermine labour, consumer and environmental protections.9 This is a pressing issue in the wake of Britain’s departure from the European Union.

 Instead of considering public funding as the main option, and access according to need and not to willingness to pay, she proposes to dismantle private services...

Connected health

 Improving Access to Care: Telemedicine Across Medical Domains

Access to health care relies on the use of available resources in attempts to achieve optimal health outcomes. It is composed of three main components: entry into the health care system, an adequate supply of services available, and timely provision of care

The article provides some useful views on telemedicine. It says,

 Frequently cited clinical limitations of telemedicine include the inability to perform comprehensive physical examinations, sacrifice of patient–provider relationships, fragmentation of care, and the potential for overprescribing/excess health care utilization. These concerns are often unsubstantiated, and while it is important to anticipate the potential shortcomings of telemedicine, innovative solutions are continuously being adopted to overcome potential barriers to implementation. Examples of such solutions include the use of user-friendly devices to gather vitals and data to facilitate remote clinical assessment, as well as utilization of interchangeable electronic health records to enable sharing of information among various providers.

Overall, the promise of telemedicine seems encouraging, and we look to further examine notable examples of its efficacy through the lens of four diverse, prototypical medical conditions with the goal of recognizing common themes and identifying areas of needed improvement. These medical conditions include stroke, heart failure, diabetes, and pregnancy.

L’home que sabia mirar el món, Manuel Castro Galeria Jordi Barnadas de l'11 de març al 9 d'abril de 2021

 

Why Spain publicly funded health expenditure is 6,3% of GDP in Spain and in Catalonia is 5,3%?

Despesa sanitària pública sobre el PIB

 Despesa sanitària a Catalunya per agents 2010-2018

Mobile medicine transformation

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF MOBILE MEDICINE, Leveraging Innovation, SeizingOpportunities, and Overcoming Obstacles of mHealth

Eleven topics in a book reflecting current mhealth:

1. Innovations in mHealth Part 1

2. Innovations in mHealth, Part 2

3. Exploring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Mobile Apps

4. Mobile Apps Critique: Heart disease and hypertension

5. Mobile Apps Critique: Diabetes and asthma

6. Mobile Apps Critique: Mental health/Depression

7. Reinventing clinical decision support: Is there a role for mobile technology?

8. Telemedicine: Opportunities and Challenges

9. Patient Engagement must be our Top Priority

10. Security and privacy concerns

11. Designing the ideal mobile medical app