When to rule out COVID-19: How many negative RT-PCR tests are needed?

How many microbiology consultants are needed?

It is difficult to measure medical staff workload and medical staff requirements in microbiology departments. A review of 14 job descriptions for consultant microbiologists showed that the number of hospital beds and the number of specimens are more reliable workload indices than the population figure. Ratios between beds or specimens and medical staff numbers may help to identify understaffed ...

Three swipes and you're out: how many swipes are needed to decontaminate plastic with disposable wipes?

At our hospital, health care workers use commercially available wipes to reduce bacterial counts on plastic surfaces. The workers use the wipes in a cursory fashion--swiping objects once for one to two seconds. We sought to measure the ability of wipes to reduce bacterial counts when swiped across plastic surfaces using various routines.

COVID-19 in Nursing Homes: The Problematic Management of Residents Without Positive COVID-19 RT-PCR

How Many Query Superpositions Are Needed to Learn?

This paper introduces a framework for quantum exact learning via queries, the so-called quantum protocol. It is shown that usual protocols in the classical learning setting have quantum counterparts. A combinatorial notion, the general halving dimension, is also introduced. Given a quantum protocol and a target concept class, the general halving dimension provides lower and upper bounds on the ...

How Many Lions Are Needed to Clear a Grid?

We consider a pursuit-evasion problem where some lions have the task to clear a grid graph whose nodes are initially contaminated. The contamination spreads one step per time unit in each direction not blocked by a lion. A vertex is cleared from its contamination whenever a lion moves to it. Brass et al. [5] showed that n 2 lions are not enough to clear the n × n-grid. In this paper, we conside...