Introduction to the special section: Tribal marketing after Covid

This article introduces the special section, "Tribal Marketing After Covid: Consuming Together in an Age of Social Distance.” The authors trace the history of tribal marketing theory up until the present, ‘post-Covid' era, outlining each wave and some trajectories for future research. © The Author(s) 2023.

Healing Right Way RCT: Novel interventions to enhance the cultural security of rehabilitation services for Aboriginal Australians with brain injury

Background: Access to rehabilitation services for Aboriginal people following acquired brain injury (ABI) is frequently hindered by challenges navigating: i) complex medical systems, ii) geographical distances from services and iii) culturally insecure service delivery. Healing Right Way is the first randomised control trial (RCT) to address these issues in partnership with multiple health service providers across Western Australia (WA). Aims: To outline the multicomponent Healing Right Way intervention by providing case studies, and describing challenges, facilitators and implications for rehabilitation services. Method: This stepped-wedge cluster RCT involved four metropolitan and four regional sites across WA. Aboriginal adults hospitalised for ABI were recruited from 2018-2021. Intervention components comprised ABI-related cultural security training (CST) for hospital staff, and employment of Aboriginal Brain Injury Coordinators (ABICs) to support ABI survivors for six months post-injury. The primary outcome was quality of life (measured with Euro QOL-5D-3L VAS) at 26 weeks. Secondary outcomes included participants' overall function and disability, anxiety and depression, carer strain, and changes to service delivery across the 26-week follow-up period. Detailed process and cost evaluations were also undertaken. Results: 108 participants were recruited from the participating sites. The CST was delivered across all eight participating hospitals with 250 hospital staff trained. ABICs supported 61 participants, 70% residing in regional, rural or remote areas. Challenges to implementation of the intervention included impacts from COVID-19 responses, hospital staff turnover and availability, recruitment of people with traumatic brain injury and methods for maintaining contact with participants and next-of-kin across locations. Collaboration with Aboriginal health providers and community networks were invaluable to maintaining contact with participants during follow-up, as was telehealth and research partnerships. Discussion/Conclusions: This landmark trial provides a novel multicomponent intervention in an underserviced population to inform muchneeded service improvements for Aboriginal people with ABI across metropolitan and rural settings.

Team-Teaching a Project-Based First-Year Seminar in Pandemic

Complete Evidence-based Practice - This paper presents a team-teaching strategy for a project-based first-year seminar during the pandemic. Three faculty members team-taught three sections of a First-Year Seminar course in Fall 2020 using project-based learning with students from five Engineering and Engineering Technology programs in the department, which encompass electrical, computer, mechanical, and manufacturing-oriented programs. This first-year seminar course has been offered in our School of Engineering and Technology at Western Carolina University for decades, but it was the first time that it had been offered with team-teaching in Fall 2020. In previous semesters this course was often “flavored” towards certain disciplines as it was shaped by the instructor who taught it, although it did have a set of common learning objectives for all sessions and shared teaching materials then. With team-teaching, we expect to see a higher degree of coherence between course topics and sessions, as well as similar, if not better, attainment of student learning outcomes. Besides the benefits to students, the instructors also benefit from team-teaching to share the teaching load and learn best practices from each other such as project design and LMS (online learning management system) usage. This team-teaching model can readily continue even after the pandemic is over. Throughout the course, the instructors met weekly or biweekly to share observations of the class and adjust plans for the next few weeks. Content-wise, the instructors were able to share their expertise on different topics in several formats. Besides learning about multiple topics, the students conducted two team-projects with typically three students on a team. The first project was to build a touchless candy dispenser. We invited community children and their families to visit the project room, one family at a time, for a safe “trick or treat” event, which was well-received, and the students were very proud. The second project was to provide a solution or a prototype to address a COVID-19 concern that they had observed or encountered. Every team was able to create a product webpage using the template provided by the instructors, and they made constructive comments to each other on the project webpages. After the courses were concluded, both faculty and students were surveyed anonymously to report their own experiences and perceptions of others. Most self-report and perception data were consistent, but there was some discrepancy, with possible explanations, which need to be examined in the future. The student scores in Fall 2020 were compared with previous semesters to find it similar to pre-pandemic semesters and have far fewer U (unsatisfactory) grades than in Spring 2020 when the whole campus went online midway. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Sars-cov-2 genetic diversity increased at least 3-fold in the us in 2020

Background: One year following the first detected SARS-CoV-2 (SC-2) infection in the U.S., there have been >26M cases and >440K deaths. During 2020, the virus spread in the U.S. in three phases: phase 1 (winter-spring), phase 2 (summer), and phase 3 (fall). We analyzed all publicly available SC-2 sequences from each phase to determine the effect of viral spread on its genetic diversity prior to the introduction of vaccines in mid-Dec 2020. Methods: We obtained 36,299 U.S. SC-2 sequences from the GISAID submitted before Dec 15, 2020 (22,434 phase 1;11,793 phase 2;and 2,072 phase 3). Genetic diversity was measured for each clade in each phase by percent average pair-wise distance (%APD). Sequences were analyzed to detect new mutations present at frequencies exceeding 5% in each of the 3 phases. Results: Six GISAID-defined clades (G/GH/GR/L/S/V) were each present in the U.S. by March 2020. The collective frequency of the three clades distinguished by the D614G mutation (G/GH/GR) increased from 83% in phase 1 to 99% in phases 2 & 3. Genetic diversity within these clades increased from 0.02% in phase 1 to 0.06% in phase 3. Non-synonymous (NS) mutations that emerged in clade G were in orf1a (7 mutations), orf1b (3), and N (3). Clade GH had the most NS mutations overall: orf1a (11), orf1b (5), S (1), and N (6), whereas Clade GR had the fewest but the most in the S gene: orf1a (6), orf1b (1), S (3), and M (1). Each of the detected mutations was unique to its respective clade. Full genome matches to variants from the U.K. (501Y.V1;clade GR) and South Africa (501Y.V2;GH) were not detected prior to Dec 15, possibly due to the delayed sequence submission to GISAID in the U.S. However, we did identify some individual S gene mutations matching those found in these variants. These mutations include 69-70del, 144del, and D1118H, and L18F, 242-244del, and E484K, respectively, each of which was already present at low frequency among sequences collected during phase 1. Conclusion: Despite limited genomic sequencing in the U.S., we measured a 3-fold increase in SC-2 diversity in 2020 prior to the introduction of vaccines and identified at least 47 emerging amino acid changes. Three NS mutations in S were mapped to antibody epitopes and one (E484K) was previously shown to confer resistance to neutralizing antibodies. These findings underscore the critical importance of increased and timely genomic sequencing to ensure the future efficacy of SC-2 vaccines and treatments.