Health System Disruption due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The interaction between COVID-19 and the cardiovascular system has been a subject of special attention. Patients with pre-existing cardiovascular disease (CVD), hypertension, or diabetes mellitus are at increased risk. 
The management of patients with COVID-19 requires resources, like medical supplies, ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE), that are limited, even in high income countries. Dealing with this situation in places where resources are scarce is even more challenging. 
In the context of COVID-19, low resource setting refers to having limited capacity to diagnose, quarantine, isolate, and treat COVID-19 patients and the cardiovascular complications or their illness, as well as acute coronary syndromes, including the use of invasive diagnostic or treatment support for acute coronary syndromes in both COVID-19 positive and negative patients.
The unprecedented burden of COVID-19 on health systems threatens to exceed hospital capacity, making it challenging to care for other cardiovascular emergencies requiring hospitalization, such as acute coronary syndromes or heart failure. 

In ideal situations, COVID-19 patients need to be segregated according to underlying cardiovascular, diabetic, respiratory, renal, oncological, or other comorbid conditions for prioritized treatment.  In addition, careful thought should be given to manage specific subsets. However, such triaging might not be feasible and challenging to implement in low resource setting .

With almost 4 million COVID-19 cases in over 200 countries worldwide is important to learn from countries experience in different geographies and contexts so lessons can be learnt.

WHF in its unique role of global convenor is organizing this webinar to bring together the experts voice and experience of confronting COVID-19 in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.