COVIDNearTerm: A simple method to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations.

Introduction: COVID-19 has caused tremendous death and suffering since it first emerged in 2019. Soon after its emergence, models were developed to help predict the course of various disease metrics, and these models have been relied upon to help guide public health policy. Methods: Here we present a method called COVIDNearTerm to "forecast" hospitalizations in the short term, two to four weeks from the time of prediction. COVIDNearTerm is based on an autoregressive model and utilizes a parametric bootstrap approach to make predictions. It is easy to use as it requires only previous hospitalization data, and there is an open-source R package that implements the algorithm. We evaluated COVIDNearTerm on San Francisco Bay Area hospitalizations and compared it to models from the California COVID Assessment Tool (CalCAT). Results: We found that COVIDNearTerm predictions were more accurate than the CalCAT ensemble predictions for all comparisons and any CalCAT component for a majority of comparisons. For instance, at the county level our 14-day hospitalization median absolute percentage errors ranged from 16 to 36%. For those same comparisons, the CalCAT ensemble errors were between 30 and 59%. Conclusion: COVIDNearTerm is a simple and useful tool for predicting near-term COVID-19 hospitalizations.

Psychosocial Correlates of Clinicians' Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Utilization.

INTRODUCTION: The purpose of this study is to extend prior research on barriers to use of a prescription drug monitoring program by examining psychosocial correlates of intended use among physicians and pharmacists. METHODS: Overall, 1,904 California physicians and pharmacists responded to a statewide survey (24.1% response rate) from August 2016 to January 2017. Participants completed an online survey examining attitudes toward prescription drug misuse and abuse, prescribing practices, prescription drug monitoring program design and ease of use, professional obligations, and normative beliefs regarding prescription drug monitoring program use. Data were analyzed in 2017. RESULTS: Perceived prescription drug monitoring program usefulness and normative beliefs fully mediated the relationship between concern about prescription drug abuse and intentions to use the prescription drug monitoring program. Clinicians' sense of professional and moral obligation to use the prescription drug monitoring program was unrelated to intention to use the prescription drug monitoring program despite a positive relationship with concern about misuse and abuse. Compared with physicians, pharmacists reported greater concern about prescription drug misuse, greater professional and moral obligation to use prescription drug monitoring program, and greater rating of prescription drug monitoring program usefulness. CONCLUSIONS: Interventions that target normative beliefs surrounding prescription drug monitoring program use and how to use prescription drug monitoring programs effectively are likely to be more effective than those that target professional obligations or moralize to the medical community.

Social control and strenuous exercise among late adolescent college students: parents versus peers as influence agents.

In the context of a model of health-related social control, we compared the associations among social control strategies, affective and behavioral reactions, and exercise for parental and peer influence agents. Late adolescent college students (n = 227) completed questionnaires that focused on social control from a parent or a peer who attempted to increase their exercising. Results from this cross-sectional study revealed that most relationships in the model were similar for parent and peer influence agents, however, (a) negative social control was a stronger predictor of reactance among parents than peers; (b) positive affect was a stronger predictor of attempts to change among peers than parents; and (c) positive affect predicted frequency of strenuous exercise only among parents. Decreasing parents' use of negative social control strategies and increasing adolescents' positive affective reactions to parental social control agents may be keys to promoting positive lifestyle changes in late adolescence.