ABSTRACT
Background: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a contagious infection caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-COV-2) and it has infected and killed millions of people across the globe. Objective: In the absence or inadequate provision of therapeutic treatments of COVID-19 and the limited convenience of diagnostic techniques, there is a necessity for some alternate spontaneous screening systems that can easily be used by the physicians to rapidly recognize and isolate the infected patients to circumvent onward surge. A chest X-ray (CXR) image can effortlessly be used as a substitute modality to diagnose the COVID-19. Method: In this study, we present an automatic COVID-19 diagnostic and severity prediction system (COVIDX) that uses deep feature maps of CXR images along with classical machine learning algorithms to identify COVID-19 and forecast its severity. The proposed system uses a three-phase classification approach (healthy vs unhealthy, COVID-19 vs pneumonia, and COVID-19 severity) using different conventional supervised classification algorithms. Results: We evaluated COVIDX through 10-fold cross-validation, by using an external validation dataset, and also in a real setting by involving an experienced radiologist. In all the adopted evaluation settings, COVIDX showed strong generalization power and outperforms all the prevailing state-of-the-art methods designed for this purpose. Conclusions: Our proposed method (COVIDX), with vivid performance in COVID-19 diagnosis and its severity prediction, can be used as an aiding tool for clinical physicians and radiologists in the diagnosis and follow-up studies of COVID-19 infected patients. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press.
ABSTRACT
River water quality is a serious concern among scientist and government agencies due to increasing anthropogenic activities and uncontrolled industrial discharge to rivers. The present study was conducted near the river mouth of the Kerian River to assess heavy metal pollution during COVID-19 pandemic-lockdown conditions and post-COVID-19 pandemic-unlock conditions. Twelve samples of shallow, middle, and bottom depths were collected at four locations along a 9.6 km reach. A concentration of eight heavy metals including Cadmium, Chromium, Copper, Iron, Manganese, Nickel, Lead, and Zinc were extracted through atomic absorption spectrometry. Total suspended solid was measured during laboratory experimentation. The results showed that, during the pandemic, concentrations of Nickel, Zinc, and Iron were high at shallow, middle, and bottom depths, respectively. Decreasing orders of heavy metal concentration are variable at different depths due to either their high sinking tendency with other existing components of water matrix or the anthropogenic source. However, almost all values of heavy metals are under the permissible limit of National Water Quality Standards of Malaysia and Food and Drug Administration. A possible reason for the lack of heavy metal pollution may be the restriction of anthropogenic activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, no significant differences were observed in total suspended solid.
ABSTRACT
Objective: To determine the preference for home quarantine and its reasons among health professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Place and Duration: Department of Obstetrics/Gynecology, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences Jamshoro, and other affiliated hospitals with LUMHS, from Apr to Sep 2021. Methodology: Eighty home-quarantined health professionals (HPs) at our institute following the exposure to confirm COVID-19 cases were included. A pre-designed questionnaire was used to analyze its reliability using Cronbach's alpha value in SPSS after completing the home quarantine period and analyzed. Results: We enrolled 80 health professionals. 43 (53.8%) were PG Trainees, followed by consultant (20%), doctors (20.0%), nurses (6.2%), and technicians (6.9%). The mean quarantined period was 15.72 ± 6.15 days (7-20 days). Doctors, PG trainees, and nurses perceived a greater level of irritability than the other health professionals. We found an association between irritability and advanced age, confinement, and being single. Generally, PG Trainee revealed higher physical activity (p= <0.001). Physical activity was significantly lower among respondents who were unmarried (p= 0.004). Conclusion: Increased satisfaction and a more homelike environment, less aggravation of symptoms, and a mild level of depression and anxiety among health care professionals were associated with home quarantine measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022, Army Medical College. All rights reserved.