Use of triage to prevent and control COVID-19
Triage refers to judging the severity of a disease according to patients’ main symptoms and signs, and arranging treatments accordingly. An important basis of triage is the recording of vital signs, including pulse, blood pressure, respiration, and heart rate. In addition, elevated body temperature and respiratory symptoms are common in COVID-19, and are closely related to disease severity. Therefore, health care workers consider body temperature and respiratory symptoms when implementing triage for patients with COVID-19. When a new infectious disease emerges, health care workers use triage for the early detection of infected patients, prevention of disease spread, and protection of the safety of medical staff. In an outpatient department, and especially in an emergency department, triage is an important procedure for managing multiple patients with infectious diseases. The outbreak and spread of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in South Korea during 2015 was due to the limited understanding of this new disease, the lack of effective prevention and control measures, and the failure to rapidly identify and isolate patients. Missed diagnoses may also lead to infection and spread of a disease among medical staff. Therefore, Koenig proposed that when health care workers encounter a patient who may have an infectious disease, certain information should be collected during triage and before recording the patient’s vital signs, a concept she called “ vital sign zero” (Koenig, 2015). Therefore, to best control the COVID-19 epidemic, medical staff must first have the answers to certain “vital sign zero” questions when encountering a new patient. In particular, medical staff should inquire about the medical history, identify potentially exposed patients as early as possible, and implement measures of isolation and protection. Thus, medical staff should integrate the concept of “vital sign zero” into the COVID-19 triage system, maintain a high degree of vigilance to COVID-19, try to identify COVID-19 patients as soon as possible, and implement measures that reduce the risk of disease transmission.