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El Ministerio de Salud de Costa Rica establece como obligatorio la aplicación de estos lineamientos en los lugares donde se brindan funciones de atención directa e indirecta de personas, en los servicios de salud públicos y privados, así como en los tres niveles de gestión del Ministerio de Salud. Debido a que los conocimientos generales y la situación epidemiológica de este nuevo coronavirus se encuentran en una condición evolutiva y dinámica, tanto en el contexto local como internacional, estos lineamientos se revisarán de forma periódica y se publicará la versión vigente en la página web del Ministerio de Salud.

Rationale: The COVID‐19 pandemic affects diverse groups of women and men differently. The risks and consequences are disproportionately felt by certain groups, especially those living in situations of vulnerability and those who experience discrimination. It is vital that country responses to COVID-19 consider equity, gender, ethnicity, and human rights perspectives to: • prevent the expansion of inequalities; • account for the everyday lived realities of different groups that may affect the success of measures. Objectives: • To function as a “first port of call” for national health policy makers to support their efforts to integrate and enhance equity, gender, ethnicity and human rights considerations and approaches into measures responding to COVID-19; • To provide links to sources of related information and guidelines, where available.

This study presents a systematic review of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques used in the detection and classification of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) medical images in terms of evaluation and benchmarking. Five reliable databases, namely, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, PubMed, ScienceDirect and Scopus were used to obtain relevant studies of the given topic. Several filtering and scanning stages were performed according to the inclusion/exclusion criteria to screen the 36 studies obtained; however, only 11 studies met the criteria. Taxonomy was performed, and the 11 studies were classified on the basis of two categories, namely, review and research studies. Then, a deep analysis and critical review were performed to highlight the challenges and critical gaps outlined in the academic literature of the given subject. Results showed that no relevant study evaluated and benchmarked AI techniques utilised in classification tasks (i.e. binary, multi-class, multi-labelled and hierarchical classifications) of COVID-19 medical images. In case evaluation and benchmarking will be conducted, three future challenges will be encountered, namely, multiple evaluation criteria within each classification task, trade-off amongst criteria and importance of these criteria. According to the discussed future challenges, the process of evaluation and benchmarking AI techniques used in the classification of COVID-19 medical images considered multi-complex attribute problems. Thus, adopting multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is an essential and effective approach to tackle the problem complexity. Moreover, this study proposes a detailed methodology for the evaluation and benchmarking of AI techniques used in all classification tasks of COVID-19 medical images as future directions; such methodology is presented on the basis of three sequential phases. Firstly, the identification procedure for the construction of four decision matrices, namely, binary, multi-class, multi-labelled and hierarchical, is presented on the basis of the intersection of evaluation criteria of each classification task and AI classification techniques. Secondly, the development of the MCDA approach for benchmarking AI classification techniques is provided on the basis of the integrated analytic hierarchy process and VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje methods. Lastly, objective and subjective validation procedures are described to validate the proposed benchmarking solutions.

oronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has recently become a public emergency and a worldwide pandemic. The clinical symptoms of severe and non-severe patients vary, and the case-fatality rate (CFR) in severe COVID-19 patients is very high. However, the information on the risk factors associated with the severity of COVID-19 and of their prognostic potential is limited. METHODS: In this retrospective study, the clinical characteristics, laboratory findings, treatment and outcome data were collected and analyzed from 223 COVID-19 patients stratified into 125 non-severe patients and 98 severe patients. In addition, a pooled large-scale meta-analysis of 1646 cases was performed. RESULTS: We found that the age, gender and comorbidities are the common risk factors associated with the severity of COVID-19. For the diagnosis markers, we found that the levels of D-dimer, C-reactive protein (CRP), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), procalcitonin (PCT) were significantly higher in severe group compared with the non-severe group on admission (D-Dimer: 87.3% vs. 35.3%, P<0.001; CRP, 65.1% vs. 13.5%, P<0.001; LDH: 83.9% vs. 22.2%, P<0.001; PCT: 35.1% vs. 2.2%, P<0.001), while the levels of aspartate aminotransferase (ASP) and creatinine kinase (CK) were only mildly increased. We also made a large scale meta-analysis of 1646 cases combined with 4 related literatures, and further confirmed the relationship between the COVID-19 severity and these risk factors. Moreover, we tracked dynamic changes during the process of COVID-19, and found CRP, D-dimer, LDH, PCT kept in high levels in severe patient. Among all these markers, D-dimer increased remarkably in severe patients and mostly related with the case-fatality rate (CFR). We found adjuvant antithrombotic treatment in some severe patients achieved good therapeutic effect in the cohort. CONCLUSIONS: The diagnosis markers CRP, D-dimer, LDH and PCT are associated with severity of COVID-19. Among these markers, D-dimer is sensitive for both severity and CFR of COVID-19. Treatment with heparin or other anticoagulants may be beneficial for COVID-19 patients.

[Introdução]: Este documento reúne orientações técnicas para agências governamentais, trabalhadores da saúde e outros públicos envolvidos, sobre como responder à disseminação comunitária. Este documento será atualizado à medida que novas informações forem disponibilizadas. Para os países em que essa resposta já esteja em preparação ou em andamento, este documento serve também como checklist para identificação de quaisquer pendências existentes.

Las recomendaciones contenidas en este documento se han elaborado en respuesta a la situación epidemiológica actual y con el conocimiento disponible hasta la fecha, y podrán ser revisadas ante cambios en el contexto o nuevas evidencias. Incluye: traslado desde la sala de internación o espacio de aislamiento; autopsia; otras actuaciones sobre el cadáver; transporte al tanatorio y destino final.

On 21 January 2020, the first case of COVID-19 imported into the region of the Americas was identified in the United States of America in the state of Washington. A few days later, on 25 January, Canada reported their first confirmed case of novel coronavirus COVID-19 in Toronto, Ontario Province. Since then and to date, there have been twenty-two (22) confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in the Region of the Americas – fifteen (15) in the United States of America and seven (7) in Canada. The 15 cases in the United States of America were reported from six (6) states – Arizona, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas and Washington between 21 January and 13 February 2020. Of the total cases, thirteen (13) had a history of travel to China and two (2) were among close house-hold contacts of previously confirmed cases. The latest two cases with travel history to China were among federally quarantined individuals in the states of Texas and California. In Canada, the seven (7) confirmed cases were reported from two (2) provinces – Ontario (3) and British Colombia (4). Of 7 cases, six had a travel history to China and one is currently under investigation regarding the site of transmission. Canada is the second country within the Region to report a confirmed case (following USA).

In response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic and shortages of laboratory-based molecular testing capacity and reagents, multiple diagnostic test manufacturers have developed and begun selling rapid and easy-to-use devices to facilitate testing outside of laboratory settings. These simple test kits are based either on detection of proteins from the COVID-19 virus in respiratory samples (e.g. sputum, throat swab) or detection, in blood or serum, of human antibodies generated in response to infection. WHO applauds the efforts of test developers to innovate and respond to the needs of the population. However, before these tests can be recommended, they must be validated in the appropriate populations and settings. Inadequate tests may miss patients with active infection or falsely categorize patients as having the disease when they do not, further hampering disease control efforts. At present, based on current evidence, WHO recommends the use of these new point-of-care immunodiagnostic tests only in research settings. They should not be used in any other setting, including for clinical decision-making, until evidence supporting use for specific indications is available. WHO continues to evaluate available immunodiagnostics tests for COVID-19 and will update this scientific brief when necessary...