These businesses failed in their duty to workers and the wider public health

In combating pandemics, more can be gained by changing citizens’ behaviours than by relying solely on the medical route. In the current COVID-19 pandemic, the struggle to contain the outbreak and push back new infection figures will ultimately be won by training citizens how to avoid creating secondary transmission chains. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the relationship between individual behaviour and group risk. Mass training of all social strata of a country’s entire population is therefore critical in mitigating the pandemic. The authors of this article argue that adult learning and education (ALE) can play a pivotal role particularly in countries where average literacy levels are low, as these are usually the same countries in which healthcare systems are more fragile. This article explains why ALE, especially the promotion of health literacy as part of ALE (which is itself part of lifelong learning), is necessary to enable individuals to make informed health-related decisions. Research has shown that low- or non-literate individuals are less responsive to health education, less likely to use disease prevention services, and less likely to successfully manage chronic disease than literate citizens. The authors refer to the evaluation of the health literacy aspect of a large-scale adult literacy campaign launched in South Africa in 2008 which has yielded measurable outcomes and proved that the intervention had enabled adults to better understand health messages. They stress the importance of populations having at least a basic level of literacy and numeracy skills to enable them to receive and act on vital information during a pandemic or disaster. They argue that ALE should in fact be understood as an inherent element of every national emergency strategy, both in terms of prior preparation for possible future emergencies (such as pandemics, earthquakes, tornados, flooding, bushfires etc.), and in terms of reaction to a given emergency such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has put unprecedented pressure on the hospital sector around the world. It has shown the importance of preparing and planning in the future for an outbreak that overwhelms every aspect of a hospital on a rapidly expanding scale. We conducted a scoping review to identify, map, and systemize existing knowledge about the relationships between COVID-19 and hospital infrastructure adaptation and capacity planning worldwide. We searched the Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed and hand-searched gray papers published in English between December 2019 and December 2021. A total of 106 papers were included: 102 empirical studies and four technical reports. Empirical studies entailed five reviews, 40 studies focusing on hospital infrastructure adaptation and planning during the pandemics, and 57 studies on modeling the hospital capacity needed, measured mostly by the number of beds. The majority of studies were conducted in high-income countries and published within the first year of the pandemic. The strategies adopted by hospitals can be classified into short-term (repurposing medical and non-medical buildings, remote adjustments, and establishment of de novo structures) and long-term (architectural and engineering modifications, hospital networks, and digital approaches). More research is needed, focusing on specific strategies and the quality assessment of the evidence.

Background: The main purpose of this research is to describe the mathematical asymmetric patterns of susceptible, infectious, or recovered (SIR) model equation application in the light of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) skewness patterns worldwide. Methods: The research modeled severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) spreading and dissemination patterns sensitivity by redesigning time series data extraction of daily new cases in terms of deviation consistency concerning variables that sustain COVID-19 transmission. The approach opened a new scenario where seasonality forcing behavior was introduced to understand SARS-COV-2 non-linear dynamics due to heterogeneity and confounding epidemics scenarios. Results: The main research results are the elucidation of three birth- and death-forced seasonality persistence phases that can explain COVID-19 skew patterns worldwide. They are presented in the following order: (1) the environmental variables (Earth seasons and atmospheric conditions); (2) health policies and adult learning education (HPALE) interventions; (3) urban spaces (local indoor and outdoor spaces for transit and social-cultural interactions, public or private, with natural physical features (river, lake, terrain). Conclusions: Three forced seasonality phases (positive to negative skew) phases were pointed out as a theoretical framework to explain uncertainty found in the predictive SIR model equations that might diverge in outcomes expected to express the disease’s behaviour.