NNEDPRO GLOBAL CENTRE RESPONSE TO THE UK GOVERNMENT OBESITY STRATEGY

Background Following considerable interest in the relationship between obesity and COVID-19, the UK Government have released a policy paper: 'Tackling obesity: empowering adults and children to live healthier lives'.1 This response may be focused on a limited and potentially historical view of overweight and obesity. We consider the complexity of the condition, its determinants, and co-existing conditions.2 Objectives We sought to gain consensus iteratively, using implementation framework thinking, to advocate for the appreciation of a wider, more complete understanding of the existing science behind obesity and the appropriate strategies needed to address it. Results We identified four strategic points and provided recommendations for more comprehensive coverage and greater impact: 1. Improving focus and messaging 2. Understanding drivers of food choice and nutritional status 3. Promoting healthy eating from early years 4. Addressing the complexity of obesity Discussion 1. Effective messaging should be inclusive, collaborative and non-judgemental, promoting co-participation in the development of messages used in public national campaigns.3 2. Higher rates of obesity are observed in socioeconomically deprived groups who rely on food assistance programmes, in which nutritional quality could be improved through involvement of nutrition professionals.4 In order to influence behaviour, basic food literacy and financial management skills could be developed, while subsidies for healthier alternatives may complement taxes on less healthy foods.5 3. Advocating for better education on food science and nutrition from early learning sectors will promote increased awareness early in life.6 This could be augmented by reinstatement of initiatives like the healthy start programme. 4. Human health is multidimensional, therefore focussing on a single-metric risks oversimplifying this complexity and undervaluing the importance of healthy behaviours, even those not directly associated with weight.7 Instead, we should consider positive lifestyle habits, rather than a narrow focus on weight or BMI alone for the individual, informed by existing and accepted scientific findings. Conclusion An integrated systems approach ought to be developed with a multipronged intervention strategy, targeting food production, supply and environments as well as marketing to improve availability of as well as accessibility to more nutrient-rich but less energy-dense foods. These combined with appropriate food education for consumers would enable more consistently healthy food choices.

Deep Learning based Customer Count/Flow Monitoring System for Social Distancing

Despite the COVID-19 vaccination drives, use of preventative measures such as masks and social distancing are still deemed essential. This paper presents an application that will allow businesses/enterprises to monitor the flow of customers by detecting people as objects, counting the number of people, tracking the safe distance between them to maintain the two-meter distance norm. The proposed solution is set up to generate an alarm when the customers reach the allowed limit as per shop dimensions or overcrowding is detected. For the implementation, YOLOv4 and YOLOv3-Tiny were used for the task of object detection and transfer learning is used to set up weights. The models were evaluated using MSCOCO API with 100 image instances per class. The results of the YOLOv4 model are also compared with YOLOv3-Tiny in terms of calculating mean, average precision (AP), frames per second (FPS), and identification of groups (crowd). Experimental results (on several video clips from a shopping center CCTV) show that the YOLOv3-Tiny maintains real-time performance even on modest hardware. It is further demonstrated that if a high-end GPU is available, the overall detection of objects and cluster identification is much more accurate and clearer using YOLOv4. © 2021 IEEE.

Impact of commodities and global stock prices on the idiosyncratic risk of Bitcoin during the COVID-19 pandemic

In times of exogenous systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to identify hedge or safe haven assets. Therefore, this paper analyzes changes in the idiosyncratic risk of Bitcoin in a portfolio of commodities and global stocks. For this purpose, the M-GARCH model employed considers the interdependence among all the portfolio assets by using a time-varying asset pricing framework. This framework measures the impact of commodities and global stock prices as sources of systemic risk for Bitcoin returns before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The evidence suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of changes in commodities and global prices on the idiosyncratic risk of Bitcoin were statistically significant. The idiosyncratic risk of Bitcoin measured as a percentage of total variance not accounted for by the proposed model rose from 86.06% to 95.05% during the pandemic. These results are in line with previous studies regarding the properties of Bitcoin as a hedge or safe haven asset for a portfolio composed of commodities and global stocks. © Edgardo Cayón Fallon, Julio Sarmiento, 2021.

The identification of needs and development of best practice guidance for the psychological support of frontline healthcare workers during and after COVID-19: A protocol for the FLoWS project

Recent estimates suggest that up to 34% of frontline workers in healthcare (FLWs) at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic response are reporting elevated symptoms of psychological distress due to resource constraints, ineffective treatments, and concerns about self-contamination. However, little systematic research has been carried out to assess the mental health needs of FLWs in Europe, or the extent of psychological suffering in FLWs within different European countries of varying outbreak severity. Accordingly, this project will employ a mixed-methods approach over three work packages to develop best-practice guidelines for alleviating psychological distress in FLWs during the different phases of the pandemic. Work package 1 will identify the point and long-term prevalence of psychological distress symptoms in a sample of Irish and Italian FLWs, and the predictors of these symptoms. Work package 2 will perform a qualitative needs assessment on a sample of Irish and Italian FLWs to identify sources of stress and resilience, barriers to psychological care, and optimal strategies for alleviating psychological distress in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Work package 3 will synthesise the findings from the preceding work packages to draft best practice guidelines, which will be co-created by a multidisciplinary panel of experts using the Delphi method. The guidelines will provide clinicians with a framework for alleviating psychological distress in FLWs, with particular relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic, but may also have relevance for future pandemics and other public health emergencies.