Efficacy of face masks and respirators in preventing upper respiratory tract bacterial colonization and co-infection in hospital healthcare workers

TL;DR: A panel of 36 experts from 12 countries issued several recommendations to help support healthcare workers caring for critically ill ICU patients with COVID-19, and assessed the certainty in the evidence using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the forces that contributed to severe shortages in personal protective equipment in the US during the COVID-19 crisis and concluded that market prices are not appropriate mechanisms for rationing inputs to health because health is a public good.

TL;DR: The study shows that the criteria employed for assessing the face mask performance must be modified to take into account the penetration dynamics of airborne droplet transmission, the fluid dynamics leakage around the filter, and reduction of efficiency during cough cycles.

TL;DR: Although N95 respirators appeared to have a protective advantage over surgical masks in laboratory settings, the meta-analysis showed that there were insufficient data to determine definitively whether N 95 respirators are superior to surgical mask in protecting health care workers against transmissible acute respiratory infections in clinical settings.

TL;DR: HAIs in hospitals are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and the method described for estimating the number of HAIs makes the best use of existing data at the national level.

TL;DR: This Review describes how S. pneumoniae uses its armamentarium of virulence factors to colonize the upper and lower respiratory tracts of the host and cause disease.

TL;DR: McCoch as discussed by the authors provides a unified, in-depth, readable introduction to the multipredictor regression methods most widely used in biostatistics: linear models for continuous outcomes, logistic models for binary outcomes, the Cox model for right-censored survival times, repeated-measures models for longitudinal and hierarchical outcomes, and generalized linear model for counts and other outcomes.