Analyzing COVID-2019 Impact on Mental Health Through Social Media Forum

This study aims to identify the potential association of mental health and social media forum during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 brings a lot of challenges to government globally. Among the different strategies the most extensively adopted ones were lockdown, social distancing, and isolation among others. Most people with no mental illness history have been found with high risk of distress and psychological discomfort due to anxiety of being infected with the virus. Panic among people due to COVID-19 spread faster than the disease itself. The misinformation and excessive usage of social media in this pandemic era have adversely affected mental health across the world. Due to limited historical data, psychiatrists are finding it difficult to cure the mental illness of people resulting from the pandemic repercussion, fueled by social media forum. In this study the methodology used for data extraction is by considering the implications of social network platforms (such as Reddit) and levering the capabilities of a semi-supervised co-training technique-based use of Naïve Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers. The experimental results shows the efficacy of the proposed methodology to identify the mental illness level (such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, and OCD) of those who are in anxious of being infected with this virus. We observed 1 to 5% improvement in the classification decision through the proposed method as compared to state-of-the-art classifiers.

Low-Dose Radiation Therapy for COVID-19: Promises and Pitfalls.

The coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has exacted an enormous toll on healthcare systems worldwide. The cytokine storm that follows pulmonary infection is causally linked to respiratory compromise and mortality in the majority of patients. The sparsity of viable treatment options for this viral infection and the sequelae of pulmonary complications have fueled the quest for new therapeutic considerations. One such option, the long-forgotten idea of using low-dose radiation therapy, has recently found renewed interest in many academic centers. We outline the scientific and logistical rationale for consideration of this option and the mechanistic underpinnings of any potential therapeutic value, particularly as viewed from an immunological perspective. We also discuss the preliminary and/or published results of prospective trials examining low-dose radiation therapy for COVID-19.

Low-Dose Radiation Therapy (LDRT) for COVID-19: Benefits or Risks?

The limited impact of treatments for COVID-19 has stimulated several phase 1 clinical trials of whole-lung low-dose radiation therapy (LDRT; 0.3-1.5 Gy) that are now progressing to phase 2 randomized trials worldwide. This novel but unconventional use of radiation to treat COVID-19 prompted the National Cancer Institute, National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to convene a workshop involving a diverse group of experts in radiation oncology, radiobiology, virology, immunology, radiation protection and public health policy. The workshop was held to discuss the mechanistic underpinnings, rationale, and preclinical and emerging clinical studies, and to develop a general framework for use in clinical studies. Without refuting or endorsing LDRT as a treatment for COVID-19, the purpose of the workshop and this review is to provide guidance to clinicians and researchers who plan to conduct preclinical and clinical studies, given the limited available evidence on its safety and efficacy.