Shadow Banking in a Crisis: Evidence from FinTech during COVID-19

We analyze lending by traditional as well as FinTech lenders during COVID-19. Comparing samples of FinTech and bank loan records across the outbreak, we find that FinTech companies are more likely to expand credit access to new and financially constrained borrowers after the start of the pandemic. However, this increased credit provision may not be sustainable;the delinquency rate of FinTech loans triples after the outbreak, but there is no significant change in the delinquency of bank loans. Borrowers holding both loan types prioritize the payment of bank loans. These results shed light on the benefits provided by shadow banking in a crisis and hint at the potential fragility of such institutions when delinquency rates spike. © 2021 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

High expression of ACE2 in the human lung leads to the release of IL6 by suppressing cellular immunity: IL6 plays a key role in COVID-19.

OBJECTIVE: The pathogenesis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) remains clear, and no effective treatment exists. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19 and uses ACE2 as a cell receptor to invade human cells. Therefore, ACE2 is a key factor to analyze the SARS-CoV-2 infection mechanism. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We included 9,783 sequencing results of different organs, analyzed the effects of different ACE2 expression patterns in organs and immune regulation. RESULTS: We found that ACE2 expression was significantly increased in the lungs and digestive tract. The cellular immunity of individuals with elevated ACE2 expression is activated, whereas humoral immunity is dampened, leading to the release of many inflammatory factors dominated by IL6. Furthermore, by studying the sequencing results of SARS-CoV-2-infected and uninfected cells, IL6 was found to be an indicator of a significant increase in the number of infected cells. However, although patients with high expression of ACE2 will release many inflammatory factors dominated by IL6, cellular immunity in the colorectum is significantly activated. This effect may explain why individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection have severe lung symptoms and digestion issues, which are important causes of milder symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: This finding indicates that ACE2 and IL6 inhibitors have important value in COVID-19.

Differentially private publication of streaming trajectory data

User-generated trajectories (e.g. during traveling) can be leveraged to offer value-added services (e.g. smart city policy formulation), but there are also privacy implications. For example, information about the routes or destinations obtained from such published trajectories can be used to profile and identify users, including during contact tracing in pandemics (e.g., COVID-19) or the monitoring of demonstrations (e.g., surveillance). However, existing trajectory publishing algorithms generally rely on batch processing platforms, and rarely pay attention to real-time privacy protection processing in streaming scenarios. Therefore, we propose a stream processing framework containing two modules for spatio-temporal data. This framework is designed to achieve high data utility, while effectively ensuring the preservation of privacy in the published results. The first module is TSP, which concurrently receives real-time queries from individuals and releases new sanitizing trajectories. The second module is VCR comprising three algorithms based on differential privacy to facilitate the publication of the distribution of position statistics. Our experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework can effectively guarantee privacy with high data utility, when the appropriate parameter configuration is chosen. In addition, compared with the baseline algorithm Ht-publication, our group-based algorithm AGn-publication achieves better data accuracy in terms of visitor counts at the same level of privacy protection. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.