Biological hazards are one of the most important and common types of hazards in emergencies and disasters. Hospital preparedness measures for biological hazards are essential for a proper response and mitigation of its effects. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate hospital preparedness measures for biological hazards.

For this research, electronic databases including Web of Science, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, ProQuest, Google Scholar, and Cochrane Library from March 1950 to June 2019 were searched. Key words such as hospital, emergency department, preparedness, plan, management, and biological hazards were used in combination with the Boolean operators OR and AND. A thematic synthesis approach through the use of MAXQDA software was applied to analyze the data.

In total, 5257 articles were identified, in which 23 articles meet the inclusion criteria for entering the process of final analysis. The findings showed three main administrative, specialized, and logistical issues regarding preparedness measures for biological hazards in hospitals.

Hospital preparedness for biological hazards is one of the most important hospital disaster plans. Results of this systematic review present valuable advice for policy-makers and hospital managers to prepare and enhance hospital performance against biological hazards.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) began to spread across Wuhan, China, by the end of 2019, and patients were unable to be hospitalized because medical resources were limited.

A questionnaire survey was conducted among 108 participants with mild COVID-19 who have isolated at home under the guidance of doctors. The results of the questionnaire and outpatient data were integrated to evaluate participants’ compliance with various epidemic prevention measures.

During isolation, most participants were able to follow epidemic prevention measures under the guidance of doctors. After 14 d from the start of isolation, 45.37% of the participants recovered. Approximately half of the participants were relieved of symptoms, and most of them were transferred to mobile cabin hospitals to continue isolation. Three participants with worsening symptoms were transferred to the designated hospitals. There were no deaths of the participants, but there were 7 family members that were infected.

During a period of home isolation under the guidance of a doctor, individuals can comply with epidemic prevention measures and symptoms can be improved. Scientific home isolation may be an effective way to relieve the strain of medical and social resources during the epidemic of COVID-19.

In late December 2019, a cluster of patients with pneumonia caused by an unknown pathogen was reported from Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. The pathogen has been identified as a novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease has been named as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The objective of this study was to perform the first holistic scientometric evaluation of coronavirus publications.

Our main source for this study was Web of Science Collection database. All items published between 1980 and 2019 were included. A distribution map of global production in coronavirus literature and scientometric networks were generated.

The United States, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Netherlands were the most productive countries. Publications in coronavirus literature have been produced from almost every country in the world, except for some countries in Asia and Africa.

While in the 1980s, the United States and developed countries from Europe were major source countries and the virus was identified only as an animal disease in the literature and its biological and genetic structure was investigated, in the 2000s, China became a major contributor of coronavirus literature because the SARS outbreak originated from southern China. Almost all most-cited publications in this period are related to SARS and the ACE2 protein.

National interpersonal distance preference is considered a cultural characteristic. Interpersonal distance is critical for the spread dynamics of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). COVID-19’s spread trend shows various characteristics in different countries. We believe that 1 of the factors influencing this variation could be national interpersonal distance preference.

We used regression analysis based on data of national interpersonal distance preferences (social, personal, and intimate) presented by Sorokowska et al. and COVID-19 rate of spread data for 40 different countries that were calculated using Our World in Data’s data.

National interpersonal distance preferences, with its 3 dimensions, significantly influence the rate of spread of COVID-19 in countries.

Understanding the relation between national interpersonal distance preference and spread of COVID-19 might be very useful information in decision-making processes of individuals, societies, and governments to develop culturally well-suited counter-pandemic policies, strategies, and procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic or any epidemic or pandemic threats in the future, instead of standard fit-to-all strategies.

In this study, we carried out a text analysis on the information disseminated and discussed among netizens on the Baidu Post Bar (the world’s largest Chinese forum) during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, to create a policy basis for health administrative departments.

We used Python tools to search for the relevant data on the Baidu Post Bar. Next, a text analysis was performed on the posts’ contents using a combination of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), sentiment analysis, and correlation analysis.

According to the LDA analysis, the public was highly interested in topics such as COVID-19 prevention, infection symptoms, infection and coping measures, sources of transmission and treatments, community management, and work resumption. The majority of the public had negative emotional values, yet a portion of the public held positive emotional values. We also performed a correlation analysis of the influencing factors was established.

Netizens’ degree of concern shown in their posts was greatly associated with the spread of COVID-19. With the rise, diffusion, outbreak, and mitigation of COVID-19 in China, netizens have successively created a large number of posts, and the topics of discussion varied over time. Therefore, the media and the government have the responsibility to distribute positive information, to correctly guide the public’s emotions to bring some sort of reassurance to the public.