No abstract

With the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, healthcare systems across the world have been pushed to the brink. The approach of traditional healthcare systems to disaster preparedness and prevention has demonstrated intrinsic problems, such as failure to detect early the spread of the virus, public hospitals being overwhelmed, a dire shortage of personal protective equipment, and exhaustion of healthcare workers. Consequently, this situation resulted in manpower and resource costs, leading to the widespread and exponential rise of infected cases at the early stage of the epidemic. To limit the spread of infection, the Chinese government adopted innovative, specialized, and advanced systems, including empowered Fangcang and Internet hospitals, as well as high technologies such as 5G, big data analysis, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. The efficient use of these new forces helped China win its fight against the virus. As the rampant spread of the virus continues outside China, these new forces need to be integrated into the global healthcare system to combat the disease. Global healthcare system integrated with new forces is essential not only for COVID-19 but also for unknown infections in the future.

Background: An increasing number of COVID-19 patients worldwide will probably need tracheostomy in an emergency or at the recovering stage of COVID-19. We explored the safe and effective management of tracheostomy in COVID-19 patients, to benefit patients and protect health care workers at the same time. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 11 hospitalized COVID-19 patients undergoing tracheostomy. Clinical features of patients, ventilator withdrawal after tracheostomy, surgical complications, and nosocomial infection of the health care workers associated with the tracheostomy were analyzed. Results:The tracheostomy of all the 11 cases (100%) was performed successfully, including percutaneous tracheostomy of 6 cases (54.5%) and conventional open tracheostomy of 5 cases (45.5%). No severe postoperative complications occurred, and no health care workers associated with the tracheostomy are confirmed to be infected by SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion:Comprehensive evaluation before tracheostomy, optimized procedures during tracheostomy, and special care after tracheostomy can make the tracheostomy safe and beneficial in COVID-19 patients.