This JAMA Guide to Statistics and Methods reviews the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model for predicting the course of infectious disease outbreaks, which describes the transition of individuals from susceptible to infected and from infected to recovered, and discusses the model’s limitations, including oversimplification of complex disease processes.
Due to the global shortage of PPE caused by increasing number of COVID-19 patients in recent months, many hospitals have had difficulty procuring adequate PPE for the clinicians who care for these patients. Faced with a shortage, hospitals have had to implement new PPE conservation policies. In this paper, we describe a tool to help hospitals better project PPE needs under various conservation policies. Though this tool is built on top of projections of the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, it is agnostic as to which model--of which many are available--provides these projections. The tool combines COVID-19 patient census projections with information like staffing ratios and frequency of patient contact to provide projections of the number of items of key types of PPE needed under three built-in conservation scenarios: standard, contingency, and crisis. Users are also able to customize the tool to the specifics of their hospital and design custom conservation policies.
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