Family-centered care during a pandemic: The hidden impact of restricting family visits (Editorial)

Abstract

From the day the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Wuhan on November 17, 2019, to the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020 (WHO, 2020a), the world we are now living in has become vastly different. In the space of a few weeks, healthcare settings in many countries were overwhelmed by a COVID-19 surge (Grasselli, Pesenti, & Cecconi, 2020; Richardson et al., 2020), and a global public health emergency developed (Jackson et al., 2020). Reports of the healthcare response to the surge of COVID-19 cases in Italy (Grasselli et al., 2020) and the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020) highlight the magnitude of the impact of COVID-19 on the healthcare system. Described as a tsunami of death (Jackson et al., 2020), the mortality associated with COVID-19 is unlike anything the current healthcare workforce has seen before.