ABSTRACT
Providing long-term career coaching or counseling has become an increasingly important part of university life as the coronavirus pandemic rapidly sweeps across the world. Career coaching has become one of the most important drivers of revenue and enrollment growth in nongovernmental schools. However, little research has been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of these long-term career coaching or counseling services. Accordingly, this study aims to use a mixed method approach to track and measure students? satisfaction from private higher vocational colleges to identify opportunities for improving employment services. Students were asked how satisfied they were with employment services provided by this private vocational school. The results obtained lead us to suggest that private higher vocational colleges could strengthen the employability of graduates by providing a wide variety of enrichment activities and establishing a regular monitoring mechanism to evaluate perceptions of their engagement and educational experiences in the current coronavirus crisis.
ABSTRACT
Background: Numerous epidemiological studies showed close relationships of outdoor air pollution with increased risk of cancer, infection, and cardiopulmonary diseases. However, a very limited number of studies investigate the potential biomarkers of the co-exposures of particle matters (PM) and bioaerosols, especially under current circumstances of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In the present study, we aimed to identify metabolic candidate biomarkers that are associated with co-exposure to PM and bioaerosols.Methods: We performed an unbiased gas/liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC/LC-MS) approach to detect urinary metabolites of 92 samples from young healthy individuals collected at three different time points with exposure to clean, polluted ambient, and purified air , followed by a cycling test after air re-pollution and re-purification with two additional time points. Subsequently, we compared metabolomic profiles in between two-time points via an integrated analysis, plus KEGG enriched pathway and time series analysis.Findings: We identified 33 and 155 differential metabolites (DMs) associated with PM and bioaerosol exposure, respectively. The results from KEGG data and time series analysis indicated significantly enriched pathways and dynamic alterations of metabolomic profiles, respectively. 16-Dehydroprogesterone and 4-Hydroxyphenylethanol in urine might be used as biomarkers for diagnosis of PM- or bioaerosol-relevant diseases.Interpretation: The present studies revealed dynamic alterations in urinary metabolites of young healthy humans with the cycling of the clean and polluted air environment. Our findings help to investigate detrimental health effects of airborne PM and bioaerosols in a real-time manner and improve clinically diagnostic tools for PM- and bioaerosol-related diseases.Funding Information: This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [NSFC Grant no. 81673958, 82074262, and 81828010]; CAMS Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences [CIFMS 2016-I2M-3-013]; The Drug Innovation Major Project of China [2018ZX09711001-007-002].Declaration of Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest in this work.Ethics Approval Statement: Our study was approved by the Ethical Committee of Guang'anmen Hospital. All recruited subjects provided written informed consent.
Subject(s)
Neoplasms , COVID-19ABSTRACT
In the middle of March, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection a global pandemic. While China experienced a dramatic decline in daily growth rate of COVID-19, multiple importations of new cases from other countries and their related local infections caused a rapid rise. Between March 12 and April 15, we collected nasopharyngeal samples from 109 imported cases from 25 countries and 69 local cases in Guangzhou, China. In order to characterize the transmission patterns and genetic evolution of this virus among different populations, we sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2. The imported viral strains were assigned to lineages distributed in Europe (33.0%), America (17.4%), Africa (25.7%), or Southeast/West Asia (23.9%). Importantly, 10 imported cases from Africa formed two novel sub-lineages not identified in global tree previously. A detailed analysis showed that the imported viral strains from Philippines and Pakistan were closely related and within the same sub-lineage, whereas Ethiopia had varied lineages in the African phylogenetic tree. In spite of the diversity of imported SARS-CoV-2, 60 of 69 local infections could be traced back to two specific small lineages imported from Africa. A combined genetic and epidemiological analysis revealed a high-resolution transmission network of the imported SARS-CoV-2 in local communities, which might help inform the public health response and genomic surveillance in other cities and regions. Finally, we observed in-frame deletions on seven loci of SARS-CoV-2 genome, some of which were intra-host mutations, and they exhibited no enrichment on the S protein. Our findings provide new insight into the viral phylodynamics of SARS-CoV-2 and beta coronavirus.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
Background: The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (Corona Virus Disease 2019) on January 30th, this study aimed to investigate the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of Corona Virus Disease 2019 in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou, and evaluate scientific basis for disease control and prevention. Methods: A total of 30 patients had been admitted to hospital from Jan 22 to Feb 22, 2020, all of them were laboratory confirmed SARS-Cov-2. Demographic, epidemiological, clinical, laboratory data were collected from Hospital information system and Epidemiological investigation reports. All data was performed by descriptive analysis, Chi-square test or non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test, as appropriate. Two sided p value less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.Results: 30 patients were enrolled, the median age was 44.5 years (IQR 33.8-52.3) and 17 (56.7%) patients were female, 14 (46.7%) patients were native and had no exposure to Hubei Province. At the time of study submission, only one patient had not been discharged and no patients died during the study. The median hospital stay was 16.0 days (IQR 12.5-20.5) and the median course of disease was 20.5 days (IQR 17.0-23.3). The most common symptoms were fever (66.7%), dry cough (26.7%), and pharyngalgia (23.3%) on first admission. Most patients were generally illness or more mild, but 10 (33.3%) patients received oxygen therapy and 14 (46.7%) patients received hormone therapy during their hospitalization. Almost half of patients showed mild lymphocytopenia and 40% patients had elevated concentrations of CRP in the early stages of COVID-19.Conclusions: Among the 30 patients were confirmed with SARA-Cov-2 infection in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou, most of them had clinical presentation of respiratory tract infection, but the median course of disease was more than 2 weeks. Further systematic prospective studies about COVID-19 should be urgently needed.