Resource Re-Allocation During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Suburban Hospital System: Implications for Outpatient Hip and Knee Arthroplasty

The COVID pandemic of 2020 has emerged as a global threat to patients, health care providers, and to the global economy. Owing to this particular novel and highly infectious strain of coronavirus, the rapid community spread and clinical severity of the subsequent respiratory syndrome created a substantial strain on hospitals and health care systems around the world. The rapid surge of patients presenting over a small period for emergent clinical care, admission to the hospital, and intensive care units with many requiring mechanically assisted ventilators for respiratory support demonstrated the potential to overwhelm health care workers, hospitals, and health care systems. The purpose of this article is to describe an effective system for redeployment of health care supplies, resources, and personnel to hospitals within a suburban academic hospital system to optimize the care of COVID patients, while treating orthopedic patients in an equally ideal setting to maximize their surgical and clinical care. This article will provide a particular focus on the current and future role of a specialty hip and knee hospital and its partnering ambulatory surgery center in the context of an outpatient arthroplasty program

Application of the Lienard-Wiechert solution to a lightning return stroke model

The electric and magnetic fields associated with the lightning return stroke are expressed as a convolution of the current waveform shape and the fields generated by a moving charge of amplitude one (i.e., the Lienard-Wiechert solution for a unit charge). The representation can be used to compute the fields produced by a current waveform of non-uniform velocity that propagates along a filament of arbitrary, but finite, curvature. To study numerically the effects of linear charge acceleration and channel curvature two simple channel models are used: the linear and the hyperbolic

Spaceborne meteorological radar studies

Various radar designs and methods are studied for the estimation of rainfall parameters from space. An immediate goal is to support the development of the spaceborne radar that has been proposed for the Tropical Rain Measuring Mission (TRMM). The effort is divided into two activities: a cooperative airborne rain measuring experiment with the Radio Research Laboratory of Japan (RRL), and the modelling of spaceborne weather radars. An airborne rain measuring experiment was conducted at Wallops Flight Facility in 1985 to 1986 using the dual-wavelength radar/radiometer developed by RRL. The data are presently being used to test a number of methods that are relevant to spaceborne weather radars. An example is shown of path-averaged rain rates as estimated from three methods: the standard reflectivity rain rate method (Z-R), a dual-wavelength method, and a surface reference method. The results from the experiment shows for the first time the feasibility of using attenuation methods from space. The purposes of the modelling are twofold: to understand in a quantitative manner the relationships between a particular radar design and its capability for estimating precipitation parameters and to help devise and test new methods. The models are being used to study the impact of various TRMM radar designs on the accuracy of rain rate estimation as well as to test the performance of range-profiling algorithms, the mirror-image method, and some recently devised graphical methods for the estimation of the drop size distribution