Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Apr 1, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 2, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 6, 2020
The 3 Steps Needed to End the COVID-19 Pandemic: Bold Public Health Leadership, Rapid Innovations, and Courageous Political Will
ABSTRACT
The world is experiencing the expansive spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2 in a global pandemic that is placing strains on healthcare, economic and social systems. Commitment to implementing proven public health strategies will require bold public health leadership and courageous acts by politicians. Developing new innovative communication, mitigation and healthcare approaches, particularly in the era of social media is also clearly warranted. We believe that the best public health evidence must inform activities in three priority areas to stop this pandemic: 1) coordinated and consistent stay-at-home orders across multiple jurisdictions, including potential nation-wide mandates; 2) rapid scale-up of SARS-CoV-2 testing; and 3) improving healthcare capacity to respond. The editorial outlines those areas, the rationale behind them, and the call for innovation and the engagement of bold public health leadership to empower courageous political action to reduce the number of people who will die during this pandemic.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.