Assessment of military preparedness for naturogenic threat: the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic

Global key concepts of civil-military cooperation for disaster management in the COVID-19 pandemic-A qualitative phenomenological scoping review

Background

In the context of a holistic and comprehensive disaster response effort to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries across the globe mobilized their military forces in order to cope with sudden and exponential surges of critically ill patients with COVID-19 in stretched healthcare systems.

Objective

The purpose of this work is to identify, map, and render world-wide key concepts of civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) in disaster management during the COVID-19 crisis visible.

Material and methods

Literature was systematically searched in three databases (PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library) on 26 January 2022, and analyzed with qualitative, mixed narrative-phenomenological methods in compliance with PRISM-ScR and SRQR.

Results

Forty-five publications were included in the analysis; pertinent authors were from 22 countries covering five continents. We identified three key thematic clusters in the published literature: Cluster (1) Medico-scientific contributions with the participation of military medical personnel or institutions: members of the military acted as subject matter experts, clinical and experimental (co-) investigators as well as co-founders for enabling COVID-19 relevant research. Areas covered were relevant to the COVID-19 patient's clinical journey from prevention, exposure, diagnostics, and treatment and included pertinent fields such as digital health and telemedicine, global and public health, critical care, emergency and disaster medicine, radiology, neurology, as well as other medical specialties, i.e., respiratory care, pulmonology, burn medicine, and transfusion medicine, in addition to environmental and occupational sciences as well as materials science. Cluster (2) CIMIC field experiences or analyses included areas such as political framework, strategy, structure, nature of civil-military interaction, and concrete mission reports in selected countries. Themes covered a broad spectrum of pandemic disaster management subjects such as capacity and surge capacity building, medical and pharmaceutical logistics, patient care under austere circumstances, SARS-CoV-2 testing support, intelligent and innovative information management, vaccination support, and disaster communication. Cluster (3) The military as a role model for crisis management.

Conclusion

Civil-military cooperation made a significant contribution to the level of resilience in crisis management on a global scale, positively impacting a broad spectrum of core abilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Development of a Methodology for Assessing Workload within the Air Traffic Control Environment in the Czech Republic

The increase in civil aviation traffic and, in general, in aviation traffic going through airspace or a military terminal control area, and the increase in military operations in temporarily reserved areas bring higher requirements for airspace throughput and for the workload of military air traffic controllers. For an objective assessment of the military air traffic controllers’ workload, it is desirable to set the maximum level of workload that can be required of such personnel. This assessment is also important for planning staffing and training. In the civil air traffic control environment, the workload of air traffic controllers is clearly determined by the complexity and density of air traffic, i.e., the throughput capacity of sectors. However, this method is not suitable for measuring the workload of military air traffic controllers, because the nature of military flight activities requires solving different situations in the airspace and thus generates a different workload. One way of obtaining more objective data on the actual workload of military air traffic controllers is to accurately determine the difficulty of individual air traffic control activities, i.e., the most common activities carried out by military air traffic controllers in the course of their duty. The difficulty of a selected air traffic control activity will be represented by a weight. A method for determining this weight is presented, including the proposal of specific weights for the calculation of the military air traffic controllers’ workload during simulation training, using the functionality “Workload”.

The Complex Systems for Conflict Interaction Modelling to Describe a Non-Trivial Epidemiological Situation

This study investigates a complex system that describes a non-trivial epidemiological model with integrated internal conflict (interregional migration) on the example of cyclic migration using the software. JetBrains PyCharm Community Edition 2020.3.3, a free and open-source integrated development environment (IDE) in the Python programming language, was chosen as the software development tool. The Matplotlib 3.5 library was used to display the modelling results graphically. The integration of internal conflict into the model revealed significant and notable changes in its behavior. This study’s results prove that not only the characteristics of the interaction factors but also the size of the values determine the direction of migration concerning relation to competitors.