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Background During the first epidemic wave, COVID-19 surveillance focused on quantifying the magnitude and the escalation of a growing global health crisis. The scientific community first assessed risk through basic indicators, such as the number of cases or rates of new cases and deaths, and later began using other direct impact indicators to conduct more detailed analyses. We aimed at synthesizing the scientific community's contribution to assessing the direct impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on population health through indicators reported in research papers. Methods We conducted a rapid scoping review to identify and describe health indicators included in articles published between January 2020 and June 2021, using one strategy to search PubMed, EMBASE and WHO COVID-19 databases. Sixteen experts from European public health institutions screened papers and retrieved indicator characteristics. We also asked in an online survey how the health indicators were added to and used in policy documents in Europe. Results After reviewing 3891 records, we selected a final sample of 67 articles and 233 indicators. We identified 52 (22.3%) morbidity indicators from 33 articles, 105 severity indicators (45.1%, 27 articles) and 68 mortality indicators (29.2%, 51). Respondents from 22 countries completed 31 questionnaires, and the majority reported morbidity indicators (29, 93.5%), followed by mortality indicators (26, 83.9%). Conclusions The indicators collated here might be useful to assess the impact of future pandemics. Therefore, their measurement should be standardized to allow for comparisons between settings, countries and different populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The National Institutes of Health (NIH) mobilized more than $4 billion in extramural funding for the COVID-19 pandemic. Assessing the research output from this effort is crucial to understanding how the scientific community leveraged federal funding and responded to this public health crisis. Methods NIH-funded COVID-19 grants awarded between January 2020 and December 2021 were identified from NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results using the "COVID-19 Response" filter. PubMed identifications of publications under these grants were collected and the NIH iCite tool was used to determine citation counts and focus (eg, clinical, animal). iCite and the NIH's LitCOVID database were used to identify publications directly related to COVID-19. Publication titles and Medical Subject Heading terms were used as inputs to a machine learning–based model built to identify common topics/themes within the publications. Results and Conclusions We evaluated 2401 grants that resulted in 14 654 publications. The majority of these papers were published in peer-reviewed journals, though 483 were published to preprint servers. In total, 2764 (19%) papers were directly related to COVID-19 and generated 252 029 citations. These papers were mostly clinically focused (62%), followed by cell/molecular (32%), and animal focused (6%). Roughly 60% of preprint publications were cell/molecular-focused, compared with 26% of nonpreprint publications. The machine learning–based model identified the top 3 research topics to be clinical trials and outcomes research (8.5% of papers), coronavirus-related heart and lung damage (7.3%), and COVID-19 transmission/epidemiology (7.2%). This study provides key insights regarding how researchers leveraged federal funding to study the COVID-19 pandemic during its initial phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 virus has, up to the time of this article, resulted in >770 million cases of COVID-19 illness worldwide, and approximately 7 million deaths, including >1.1 million in the United States. Although defined as a respiratory virus, early in the pandemic, it became apparent that considerable numbers of people recovering from COVID-19 illness experienced persistence or new onset of multi-system health problems, including neurologic and cognitive and behavioral health concerns. Persistent multi-system health problems are defined as Post-COVID-19 Condition (PCC), Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19, or Long COVID. A significant number of those with PCC report cognitive problems. This paper reviews the current state of scientific knowledge on persisting cognitive symptoms in adults following COVID-19 illness. A brief history is provided of the emergence of concerns about persisting cognitive problems following COVID-19 illness and the definition of PCC. Methodologic factors that complicate clear understanding of PCC are reviewed. The review then examines research on patterns of cognitive impairment that have been found, factors that may contribute to increased risk, behavioral health variables, and interventions being used to ameliorate persisting symptoms. Finally, recommendations are made about ways neuropsychologists can improve the quality of existing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered several changes in countries' health purchasing arrangements to accompany the adjustments in service delivery in order to meet the urgent and additional demands for COVID-19-related services. However, evidence on how these adjustments have played out in low- and middle-income countries is scarce. This paper provides a synthesis of a multi-country study of the adjustments in purchasing arrangements for the COVID-19 health sector response in eight middle-income countries (Armenia, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, Romania and Ukraine). We use secondary data assembled by country teams, as well as applied thematic analysis to examine the adjustments made to funding arrangements, benefits packages, provider payments, contracting, information management systems and governance arrangements as well as related implementation challenges. Our findings show that all countries in the study adjusted their health purchasing arrangements to varying degrees. While the majority of countries expanded their benefit packages and several adjusted payment methods to provide selected COVID-19 services, only half could provide these services free of charge. Many countries also streamlined their processes for contracting and accrediting health providers, thereby reducing administrative hurdles. In conclusion, it was important for the countries to adjust their health purchasing arrangements so that they could adequately respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in some countries financing challenges resulted in issues with equity and access. However, it is uncertain whether these adjustments can and will be sustained over time, even where they have potential to contribute to making purchasing more strategic to improve efficiency, quality and equitable access in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic is the most recent—and most severe—crisis to face the microfinance/financial inclusion sector, but it was far from the first. From its earliest years, crises have appeared throughout the modern history of microfinance, and the responses they engendered have included some of the most significant reforms and innovations in the sector. In this paper, we describe selected historical crises—Peru in the 1980s, Grameen in the 1990s, and Andhra Pradesh and others in the 2007–2010 period—through their legacy and impact on the sector's activities and priorities. We then examine some of the pressures on institutions during the pandemic, through interview data with MFI leaders from the Sentinel Project conducted during 2021–22. We argue that the resilience of the sector to the unprecedented pressures of the pandemic can be traced to many of these historical post-crisis reforms—and consider what this means for future crisis responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The estimation of unknown parameters in simulations, also known as calibration, is crucial for practical management of epidemics and prediction of pandemic risk. A simple yet widely used approach is to estimate the parameters by minimising the sum of the squared distances between actual observations and simulation outputs. It is shown in this paper that this method is inefficient, particularly when the epidemic models are developed based on certain simplifications of reality, also known as imperfect models which are commonly used in practice. To address this issue, a new estimator is introduced that is asymptotically consistent, has a smaller estimation variance than the least-squares estimator, and achieves the semiparametric efficiency. Numerical studies are performed to examine the finite sample performance. The proposed method is applied to the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic for 20 countries based on the susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered model with both deterministic and stochastic simulations. The estimation of the parameters, including the basic reproduction number and the average incubation period, reveal the risk of disease outbreaks in each country and provide insights to the design of public health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) exposed weaknesses in the health systems of countries such as Nigeria, which affected the effectiveness of the health system response to the pandemic. This paper provides new knowledge on the level of the availability, effectiveness and equity of resources in response to COVID-19 in Nigeria. This is valuable information for improving the delivery of countermeasures against future pandemics. Methods The study was conducted at the federal level and in two states in Nigeria. The states were Lagos in the southwest and Enugu in the southeast. In-depth interviews were undertaken with 34 key informants. NVivo version 12 software was used for coding and thematic analysis. Results There were inadequate, inequitable and suboptimal resources (human, financial, equipment and materials) for the response. In some of the countermeasures, only people that were employed in the formal sector benefitted from the distribution of welfare materials and financial packages; the informal sector, which constitutes the majority of the poor population in Nigeria, was excluded. Conclusions Inequity and suboptimal availability of resources to control COVID-19 led to reduced effectiveness of the health system response to the disease in Nigeria. Such negative factors must be mitigated in future responses to pandemics in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global public–private partnerships (PPPs) have become prominent in efforts to address global challenges, particularly in the health field. In the scholarly literature, global PPPs have been conceptualized as arenas for voluntary public–private cooperation rather than agents of global governance. This paper challenges this approach, arguing that a sub-class of highly institutionalized partnerships have developed into transnational bureaucracies that, much like international organizations, can draw from their administrative capacities to exercise agency and gain and consolidate authority over time. To substantiate this argument, I present an in-depth analysis of five global health partnerships that played a leading role in the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), the initiative that sought to coordinate the global response to covid-19. Based on extensive document review and analysis of the ACT-A PPPs —Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, Unitaid, and The Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics — I show how these partnerships' leadership role during the pandemic emerged from a decade long build-up of PPP agency. These organizations gained administrative capacities that enabled them to increase their authority vis-à-vis their donors, boards, and other external actors through three interlinked strategies: (a) developing greater financial autonomy; (b) expanding their mandates (including toward pandemic preparedness and response); and (c) establishing inter-partnership cooperation and mutual representation to other forums. My analysis suggests the need for future research to consider highly institutionalized PPPs as agents of global governance and to explore empirically and theoretically the consequences of their rising authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Global Commissions of Inquiry" have usually been associated with the multilateral initiatives of governments and international organizations. However, various styles of "global commission" have emerged over time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, global commissions have been a key aspect of the COVID-19 international policy landscape, quickly emerging, in 2020 and 2021, to corral knowledge and evidence. These include "formal" commissions, such as the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response and the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy, and "informal" commissions, including the Reform for Resilience and The Lancet Covid Commissions. This paper considers whether these Commissions have been engines for new ideas and global policy knowledge or whether this "chorus" of COVID Commissions represented a "clutter" of ideas at a time when global policy focus was needed. Global Commissions, in general, deserve greater scholarly attention to their design and the construction of their legitimate authority as hybrid and private commissions enter global policy making alongside official commissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The USA has been particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and a wide spatial variation can be seen in its spread and mortality. This raises the question of why some regions are more resilient to the pandemic than others? We hypothesize that the individualism–collectivism cleavage explains the disparity in COVID-19 cases observed across sub-national units in the USA. Cultural disparity among different groups of people leads to differences in how they perceive health crises and thereby shapes the way they respond to pandemics. A heightened sense of obligation and responsibility increases in-group sociability and interdependence and raises the perceived vulnerability towards disease transmission among collectivistic individuals, and this leads to greater adherence to containment measures and social distancing rules. Our results provide evidence that more individualistic states tend to have more COVID-19 cases across the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]