Question

The City DOH repeat their recommendation about avoiding unnecessary travel, and the contact rate becomes 0.000025. The city hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) can only handle 50 cases at the same time, and there is no alternative ICU available. The DOH wants to ensure the city hospital does not run out ICU beds, even if all ICU beds are used for influenza cases. The DOH know that a policy of asking everyone to wear a mask will reduce the influenza transmission probability to 0.29. Would such a policy be sufficient to ensure that there are enough ICU beds at the peak of the epidemic? (4 points)

Answer 1

During a epidemic situation like influenza ,the use of face mask with high adherence will help in reducing the transmission rate. Such a peak level situation of infection , the short supply of vaccines and other antiviral drugs may occur so we mostly depend on nonpharmaceutical interventions like masks, sanitiser, gloves etc... These nonpharmaceuticals may reduce the risk of infection through air, contact etc and also reduce the no of patients .So the introduction of such a policy will ensure that there are enough ICU beds at the peak of epidemic.