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COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations

INTRODUCTION: The CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a formidable threat to populations around the world. The U.S. Military, in particular, represents a unique and distinguishable subset of the population, primarily due to the age and gender of active duty personnel. Current invest...

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Autores principales: Riley, Pete, Ben-Nun, Michal, Turtle, James, Bacon, David, Owens, Akeisha N, Riley, Steven
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8524473/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34632512
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usab404
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author Riley, Pete
Ben-Nun, Michal
Turtle, James
Bacon, David
Owens, Akeisha N
Riley, Steven
author_facet Riley, Pete
Ben-Nun, Michal
Turtle, James
Bacon, David
Owens, Akeisha N
Riley, Steven
author_sort Riley, Pete
collection PubMed
description INTRODUCTION: The CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a formidable threat to populations around the world. The U.S. Military, in particular, represents a unique and distinguishable subset of the population, primarily due to the age and gender of active duty personnel. Current investigations have focused on health outcome forecasts for civilian populations, making them of limited value for military planning. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We have developed and applied an age-structured susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered, or dead compartmental model for both civilian and military populations, driven by estimates of the time-dependent reproduction number, R(t), which can be both fit to available data and also forecast future cases, intensive care unit (ICU) patients, and deaths. RESULTS: We show that the expected health outcomes for active duty military populations are substantially different than for civilian populations of the same size. Specifically, while the number of cases is not expected to differ dramatically, severity, both in terms of ICU burdens and deaths, is substantially lower. CONCLUSIONS: Our results confirm that the burden placed on military health centers will be substantially lower than that for equivalent-sized civilian populations. More practically, the tool we have developed to investigate this (https://q.predsci.com/covid19/) can be used by military health planners to estimate the resources needed in particular locations based on current estimates of the transmission profiles of COVID-19 within the surrounding civilian population in which the military installation is embedded. As this tool continues to be developed, it can be used to assess the likely impact of different intervention strategies, as well as vaccine policies; both for the current pandemic as well as future ones.
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spelling pubmed-85244732021-10-20 COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations Riley, Pete Ben-Nun, Michal Turtle, James Bacon, David Owens, Akeisha N Riley, Steven Mil Med Feature Article and Original Research INTRODUCTION: The CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a formidable threat to populations around the world. The U.S. Military, in particular, represents a unique and distinguishable subset of the population, primarily due to the age and gender of active duty personnel. Current investigations have focused on health outcome forecasts for civilian populations, making them of limited value for military planning. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We have developed and applied an age-structured susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered, or dead compartmental model for both civilian and military populations, driven by estimates of the time-dependent reproduction number, R(t), which can be both fit to available data and also forecast future cases, intensive care unit (ICU) patients, and deaths. RESULTS: We show that the expected health outcomes for active duty military populations are substantially different than for civilian populations of the same size. Specifically, while the number of cases is not expected to differ dramatically, severity, both in terms of ICU burdens and deaths, is substantially lower. CONCLUSIONS: Our results confirm that the burden placed on military health centers will be substantially lower than that for equivalent-sized civilian populations. More practically, the tool we have developed to investigate this (https://q.predsci.com/covid19/) can be used by military health planners to estimate the resources needed in particular locations based on current estimates of the transmission profiles of COVID-19 within the surrounding civilian population in which the military installation is embedded. As this tool continues to be developed, it can be used to assess the likely impact of different intervention strategies, as well as vaccine policies; both for the current pandemic as well as future ones. Oxford University Press 2021-10-11 /pmc/articles/PMC8524473/ /pubmed/34632512 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usab404 Text en © The Association of Military Surgeons of the United States 2021. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Feature Article and Original Research
Riley, Pete
Ben-Nun, Michal
Turtle, James
Bacon, David
Owens, Akeisha N
Riley, Steven
COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations
title COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations
title_full COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations
title_fullStr COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations
title_full_unstemmed COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations
title_short COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations
title_sort covid-19: on the disparity in outcomes between military and civilian populations
topic Feature Article and Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8524473/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34632512
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usab404
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