ABSTRACT
Nowadays, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted communities' mental health worldwide. Therefore, studies on minimizing the pandemic's mental health impact are urgently needed. This study aimed to examine the role of patience on distance learners' mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. A correlational study was conducted involving a total of 330 university students of distance learners, and they were selected using stratified random sampling. The Patience Scale (PS-11) was used to measure interpersonal patience, life hardships patience, and daily hassles patience. The Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21) were used to measure mental health from the aspects of depression, anxiety, and stress. The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis and multiple regression. The study showed that life hardships and patience were predictors of reducing depression and anxiety. Besides that, life hardships patience and interpersonal patience were predictors of reducing stress, and the main contributing factor was life hardships patience. This study contributes to humanistic therapy theories and their practical implications. It also contributes to developing the national mental health policy strategy, Ministry of Health Malaysia, and Sustainable Development Goals 2030. © 2023 The Authors. Published by IASE.
ABSTRACT
Covid-19 which has started to spread to Malaysia in 2020 has changed the lifestyle of the people in terms of economic, social and environmental. The new living norms introduced have changed lives and have stunted the economic growth of the country especially when many companies have closed their businesses. An impact from the movement control order (MCO) implemented has an impact on the employment sector. This is because, many employment sectors had to be closed in an effort to help the government curb the spread of COVID-19 from continuing to spread in the community. Most companies, business operations, private organizations and the government were shut down immediately during MCO, which has resulted in many companies not being able to cover their expenses, causing companies to lay off employees. Although it affects everyone but the disabled are more impressed with the limitations they have experienced before. The purpose of this study is to find out the perception of persons with disabilities (PwDs) on the potential of upgrading the accessibility of private premises to be PwDs friendly as a physical stimulus for the development of PwDs businesses and small enterprises. Therefore, this study uses an exploratory mixed method design approach by starting the study by reviewing the documents related to government financial assistance and subsequently distributing the survey form. The conclusion of this study will highlight the perceptions of PWDs in the field of entrepreneurship in physical premises and government financial assistance that has been provided before and during the pandemic in Malaysia.
ABSTRACT
The proliferation of the internet and computing devices has drawn much attention during the Covid-19 pandemic stay home and work, and this has led the organization to adapt to staying home. Also, to let the organization work due to the infrastructure for working on proxy during the pandemic. The alarming rate of cyber-attacks, which through this study infer that phishing is one of the most effective and efficient ways for cyber-attack success. In this light, this study aims to study phishing attacks and mitigation methods in play, notwithstanding analysing performance metrics of the current mitigation performance metrics. Results indicate that business enterprises and educational institutions are the most hit using email (social engineering) and web app phishing attacks. The most effective mitigation methods are training/awareness campaigns on social engineering and using artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML). To gain zero or 100% phishing mitigation, AI/ML need to be applied in large scale to measure its efficiency in phishing mitigation. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Since the COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia, the government had introduced measures to reduce the number infected including lockdowns, wearing facial masks, frequent hand washing and social distancing. Everyone had to follow and cope with this new lifestyle which affected them socio-economically and mentally. Objective(s): To determine the level of knowledge and impact of Covid-19 on residents of Batu Gajah township. Material(s) and Method(s): This cross-sectional study was conducted in February 2021 on Batu Gajah Township residents in Kinta District, Perak, Malaysia. The sample size calculated was 96 with a precision of 10% for 95% confidence interval, assuming 50% of respondents will have socio economic and mental health issues. As only one week was allotted for data collection, the sample size of 96 was chosen. Prior ethical approval and consent of respondents were obtained. Batu Gajah residents were invited to participate via WhatsApp and Facebook groups. They answered a pre-tested questionnaire (online using google form) which had 12, 10 and 16 questions respectively on knowledge, socioeconomic status and mental health. Result(s) and Conclusion(s): In total 109 responded and most of them 104 (95%) had good knowledge on COVID-19. Socioeconomic impact in terms of problem in paying bills was 40 (36.7%);whilst 53 (48.6%) stated they had no other resources to support themselves and 44 (40.4%) had to use their savings to make ends meet. Forty-five respondents (41.2%) stated they were worrying too much;34 (31.2%) had trouble relaxing, 37 (37%) had trouble sleeping and 14 (12.8%) had thoughts about ending their lives. Overall, 20% had poor psychological health. The association between the socioeconomic status and mental health was statistically significant with p-value = 0.00896. Most of the respondents had good knowledge of COVID-19 with a substantial number affected financially and psychologically by the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
Introduction Healthcare workers are at a substantially increased risk of being infected by COVID-19 patients. However, risk of being infected is depending on the critical phase of the pandemic, patients with COVID-19 might not be the absolute source of infection. Health workers could also be exposed to infected colleagues, infected family members, lives in communities of active transmission, or infected contacts during crowded events such as wedding reception and religious gathering. Objectives To explore the epidemiology data of COVID-19 infection among health care workers at Malaysia Hospitals especially on patterns of transmission and characteristics. Methods A cross-sectional surveillance study among infected COVID-19 healthcare workers working at Malaysia government hospitals. Results 1608 healthcare staffs at hospitals have been notified with COVID-19 infection in year 2020. By proportion, nursing occupation contribute up to 40.5%, followed by medical doctor (20.8%), healthcare assistant (9.7%), medical doctor assistant (9.1%), medical specialist (3.2%) and hospital administrative assistant (2.8%). Most of cases were reported from Sabah (39.8%), Selangor (27.5%), Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur & Putrajaya (6.7%), Sarawak (6.0%), Perak (5.6%) and Johor (4.7%). By gender, seven out of ten infected healthcare staffs were female and majority of them have no comorbidity (87%). In addition, rate of COVID-19 infection among healthcare workers was proportionately increased with rate of COVID-19 infection among community. Investigation by health authorities found 43.2% of COVID-19 infection cause by community, 36.3% occurred between staff to staff and 17% occurred between patients to staff. Conclusion Preponderance of infection has occurred within hospital environment. Occupational Safety and Health Unit should set up a good engagement with healthcare staff and effective strategies to protect and support the health, safety and wellbeing of staff through deep-rooted assessment of standard practice procedure especially in nursing and care activities. Digital contact tracing could improve contact tracing within hospital setting.
ABSTRACT
The hybrid conjugate gradient (CG) method is among the efficient variants of CG method for solving optimization problems. This is due to their low memory requirements and nice convergence properties. In this paper, we present an efficient hybrid CG method for solving unconstrained optimization models and show that the method satisfies the sufficient descent condition. The global convergence prove of the proposed method would be established under inexact line search. Application of the proposed method to the famous statistical regression model describing the global outbreak of the novel COVID-19 is presented. The study parameterized the model using the weekly increase/decrease of recorded cases from December 30, 2019 to March 30, 2020. Preliminary numerical results on some unconstrained optimization problems show that the proposed method is efficient and promising. Furthermore, the proposed method produced a good regression equation for COVID-19 confirmed cases globally. © 2021 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.