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Introduction The surge of SARS-CoV-2-virus infected (COVID-19) patients presenting to New York City (NYC) hospitals quickly overwhelmed and outnumbered the available acute care and intensive care resources in NYC in early March 2020. Upon the arrival of military medical assets to the Javits Convention Center in NYC, the planned mission to care for non-SARS-CoV-2 patients was immediately changed to manage patients with (SARS-CoV-2)COVID-19 and their comorbid conditions. Healthcare professionals from every branch of the uniformed services, augmented by state and local resources, staffed the Javits New York Medical Station (JNYMS) from April 2020. Methods The data review reported aggregated summary statistics and participant observations collected by N.Y. State and U.S. military officials. Results During the 28 days of patient intake at the JNYMS, 1,095 SARS-CoV-2-positive patients were transferred from NYC hospitals to the JNYMS. At its peak, the JNYMS accepted 119 patients in a single day, had a maximum census of 453, and had a peak intensive care unit census of 35. The median length of stay was 4.6 days (interquartile range: 3.1-6.9 days). A total of 103 patients were transferred back to local hospitals, and there were 6 deaths, with an overall mortality rate of 0.6% (95% CI, 0.3-1.2). Discussion and Conclusions This is the first report of the care provided at the JNYMS. Within 2 weeks, this multi-agency effort was able to mobilize to care for over 1,000 SARS-CoV-2 patients with varying degrees of illness in a 1-month period. This was the largest field hospital mobilization in the U.S. medical history in response to a non-wartime pandemic. Its success with huge patient throughput including disposition and low mortality relieved critical overcrowding and supply deficiencies throughout NYC hospitals. The downstream impact likely saved additional hundreds of lives and reduced stress on the system during this healthcare crisis.

Concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) related to professional football has received much attention within emergency care and sports medicine. Research suggests that some of this may be due to a greater likelihood of initial helmet contact (IHC), however this association has not been studied across all age groups. This study aims to investigate the association between player age and IHC in American football.Retrospective review of championship games between 2016 and 2018 at 6 levels of amateur tackle football as well as the National Football League (NFL). Trained raters classified plays as IHC using pre-specified criteria. A priori power analysis established the requisite impacts needed to establish non-inferiority of the incidence rate of IHC across the levels of play.Thirty-seven games representing 2912 hits were rated. The overall incidence of IHC was 16% across all groups, ranging from 12.6% to 18.9%. All but 2 of the non-NFL divisions had a statistically reduced risk of IHC when compared with the NFL, with relative risk ratios ranging from 0.55-0.92. IHC initiated by defensive participants were twice as high as offensive participants (RR 2.04, p0.01) while 6% [95% CI 5.4-7.2] of all hits were helmet-on-helmet contact.There is a high rate of IHC with a lower relative risk of IHC at most levels of play compared to the NFL. Further research is necessary to determine the impact of IHC; the high rates across all age groups suggests an important role for education and prevention.

As digital platforms have come to play a central role in the news and information ecosystem, a new realm of watchdog journalism has emerged – the platform beat. Journalists on the platform beat report on the operation, use and misuse of social media platforms and search engines. The platform beat can serve as an important mechanism for increasing the accountability of digital platforms, in ways that can affect public trust in the platforms, but that can also, hopefully, lead to the development of stronger, more reliable, and ultimately more trustworthy, platforms. However, there are a number of tensions, vulnerabilities and potential conflicts of interest that characterize the platform beat. This article explores these complex dynamics of the platform beat in an effort assess the capacity of those on the platform beat to enhance the accountability and trustworthiness of digital platforms.

Unlike many other countries around the world, the United States has taken relatively little substantive action in the realm of platform governance, despite the United States being directly impacted by occurrences such as Russian interference in the 2016 election, domestic disinformation related to the 2020 election, the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal and the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation that has accompanied the Coronavirus pandemic. Yet the past four years have involved numerous Congressional hearings on various aspects of platform governance and a multitude of bills have been introduced addressing a similarly wide range of platform governance issues. With so many indicators of potential government action over the past half-decade, but so few actual policy interventions, platform governance appears to be a prime example of a policy-making context in which symbolic actions are taking precedence over substantive actions. This article illustrates this dynamic through an analysis of recent platform governance developments in the United States.

Study objective People with opioid use disorder are vulnerable to disruptions in access to addiction treatment and social support during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study objective was to understand changes in emergency department (ED) utilization following a nonfatal opioid overdose during COVID-19 compared to historical controls in 6 healthcare systems across the United States. Methods Opioid overdoses were retrospectively identified among adult visits to 25 EDs in Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island from January 2018 to December 2020. Overdose visit counts and rates per 100 all-cause ED visits during the COVID-19 pandemic were compared with the levels predicted based on 2018 and 2019 visits using graphical analysis and an epidemiologic outbreak detection cumulative sum algorithm. Results Overdose visit counts increased by 10.5% (n=3486; 95% confidence interval [CI] 4.18% to 17.0%) in 2020 compared with the counts in 2018 and 2019 (n=3020 and n=3285, respectively), despite a 14% decline in all-cause ED visits. Opioid overdose rates increased by 28.5% (95% CI 23.3% to 34.0%) from 0.25 per 100 ED visits in 2018 to 2019 to 0.32 per 100 ED visits in 2020. Although all 6 studied health care systems experienced overdose ED visit rates more than the 95th percentile prediction in 6 or more weeks of 2020 (compared with 2.6 weeks as expected by chance), 2 health care systems experienced sustained outbreaks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion Despite decreases in ED visits for other medical emergencies, the numbers and rates of opioid overdose-related ED visits in 6 health care systems increased during 2020, suggesting a widespread increase in opioid-related complications during the COVID-19 pandemic. Expanded community- and hospital-based interventions are needed to support people with opioid use disorder and save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Introduction to this special issue on Policy Issues in Digital Journalism explores the reasons why this is a particularly important time for scholars to be exploring policy issues in digital j...