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Kevin Kavanagh, MD: “India has the double mutation [COVID-19] variant. That’s the variant that has two escape mutations. And that is a variant we do not need to get into the United States and have it spread. Infection preventionists need to be out there beating the drum. First in their facility: They need to get everybody vaccinated.”

Ultraviolet-C light makes benzalkonium chloride, which is found in many disinfectants, safer to use.

What happens in India, or anywhere else in the world, doesn't stay there. The longer COVID-19 hangs around, the more chance it has of mutating into a variant that the vaccines won't stop.

Between the trifecta of departments responsible for infection prevention—EVS, nursing and infection prevention—it’s every individual’s responsibility to ensure surface cleaning and disinfecting are done quickly and effectively.

During this time, as hospital case counts drop, IPs are expected to just switch back to normal while still ensuring a readiness to respond to COVID-19.

The truth is that variants will occur where the virus spreads and until SARS-CoV-2 is controlled everywhere, it won’t be controlled anywhere. What is occurring in India is a prime example of this.

COVID-19 helped to speed up adoption of telehealth. When it comes to telehealth platforms, though, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach.

Nurses need a seat at the table when discussing PPE stockpiling and purchasing practices to share their lived experiences and help the team discover where practice deviated from plans. Infection preventionists should support the nurses in these discussions as allies.

IPs and other health care professionals needed to improvise. That improvisation led to investigations into how many times an N95 can be reused and still keep SARS- CoV-2 at bay.

MIT professors argue that many variables should be included when determining just how much social distancing is needed in different indoor settings.

Hospital employees performed hand hygiene under the gaze of infection preventionists, and the study data were gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you work in a health care facility, you need to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2. If you choose not to become vaccinated, then you should choose not to be working in a health care setting.

Though spring is in the air and we’re all anxious to get our old lives back, we’re not quite out of the COVID-19 woods yet.

Investigators University of Michigan-Flint, School of Nursing noted that the Cooper Tool and the Stone criteria are similar but use different methods to arrive at a UTI diagnosis.

The inspection was initiated after reports had come to the surface that workers at the plant had accidently contaminated J&J doses with the virus from the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is also manufactured there.

Kaiser Family Foundation: “Federal, state, and local officials, and the private sector, will face the challenge of having to figure out how to increase willingness to get vaccinated among those still on the fence.”

Luke Daum, PhD: “With regards to testing in the US, no other country compares to us. We do a great job in all 50 states of testing, having turnaround testing for using qPCR collection for at-home, or through the drive-through centers at CVS or Walgreens.”

It’s important to match COVID-19 masking rules to reasoning behind them.

The risk of COVID-19 surface transmission is low, says the CDC, and is especially low outdoors.

Meri Pearson, MPH, CIC: “Infection preventionists still need to do those active audits to make sure that they’re actually seeing what’s happening at the bedside.”

The number of syphilis cases in 2000 raised hopes that it could be eradicated, but since 2015 cases have risen 74%.

Christina Yen, MD: “For any infection preventionists who are thinking about or are reviewing the need for VHP sometime in the future, just know that those colleagues that we’ve relied on this time around are going to be there and are going to be your partners in the VHP process.”

The lessons infection preventionists at the University of Mississippi Medical Center learned from an outbreak of respiratory illness at the facility’s NICU in 2019, were later used to help deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ultraviolet light should be used in concert with traditional cleaning and disinfection procedures utilized by environmental services teams, study’s author maintains.

The infection prevention and business intelligence teams at Piedmont Healthcare put their heads together to streamline the process of tracking health care-acquired infections.

Emilie Bédard, PhD: “We worked in collaboration with infection prevention, environmental services…. We had a multi-disciplinary team to make sure that we would look at all aspects of this approach.”

Surgical masks offer better protection against aerosolized particles than face shields or even better than face shields and surgical masks used together, study finds.

The multidisciplinary team included NICU nurses, physicians, nurse practitioners and, perhaps most important of all, environmental services personnel. “We met with the environmental services staff, and we explained to them that this is a critical situation in the neonatal ICU. And this cannot spread more.”

Joachim L. Schultze, MD: “We decided that the knowledge that we have in immunology, as well as in genomics and single-cell technology, should be used to understand this new disease.”

Stand with the 7000 other infection preventionists who decided it’s important to be certified. It isn’t easy, but the satisfaction of this achievement far outweighs the preparation needed to pass.