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Abstract
Our nation’s health care infrastructure faces unprecedented challenges in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the congenital heart disease (CHD) community is no exception. These challenges include looming resource scarcities of equipment, personnel, and blood. In addition, there are the substantial infection risks to patients, family members, and staff. These factors necessitate thoughtful but often difficult decisions on how to best triage patients with CHD. Our relatively small workforce adds another dimension to the challenge, since the rapid spread of COVID-19 could result in program closure at a moment’s notice secondary to insufficient personnel as a result of infection or quarantine. Although many sectors of our society can be placed on hiatus during this period of crisis, our patients’ diseases continue requiring care, particularly among newborns and infants who often require operations during a narrow temporal window for satisfactory outcomes.
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