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Drawing on Miller and Le Breton-Miller's (2005 & 2022) conceptualization of family firms' priorities (continuity, community, connections, and command) and the organizational psychological capital theory (Luthans and Youssef, 2004), we develop a mediation model of how organizational psychological capital and family firm image affect resilience capability and risk taking (which in turn influence resilience). This model is tested on 200 family-owned small and medium sized (SME) hotels in Turkey. Our study demonstrates that intangible forces can be differentially leveraged to build resilience capability. This in turn strengthens resilience in firms confronting the Covid crisis. This paper further highlights that while the development of capabilities and strategic actions is important in generating firm resilience, the assets that are used to achieve this outcome matter the most. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd
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Background & Aim: The long-term effects of human mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) treatment on COVID-19 patients have not been fully characterized. The aim of this study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a MSC treatment administered to severe COVID-19 patients enrolled in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial (NCT 04288102). Methods, Results & Conclusion(s): A total of 100 patients experiencing severe COVID-19 received either MSC treatment (n = 65, 4x107 cells per infusion) or a placebo (n = 35) combined with standard of care on days 0, 3, and 6. Patients were subsequently evaluated 18 and 24 months after treatment to evaluate the long-term safety and efficacy of the MSC treatment. The outcomes measured included: 6-minute walking distance (6-MWD), lung imaging, quality of life according to the Short Form 36 questionnaire, COVID-19-related symptoms, titers of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, MSC-related adverse events (AEs), and tumor markers. Two years after treatment, a marginally smaller proportion of patients had a 6-MWD below the lower limit of the normal range in the MSC group than in the placebo group (OR = 0.19, 95% CI: 0.04-0.80, Fisher's exact test, p = 0.015). On the SF-36 questionnaire, a marginally higher general health score was received by the MSC group at month 18 compared with the placebo group (50.00 vs. 35.00;95% CI: 0.00-20.00, Wilcoxon rank sum test, p = 0.016). In contrast, there were no differences in the total severity score of lung imaging or the titer of neutralizing antibodies between the two groups. Meanwhile, there were no MSC-related AEs reported at the 18- or 24-month follow-ups. The serum levels of most of the tumor markers examined remained within normal ranges and were similar between the MSC and placebo groups. Long-term safety was observed for the COVID-19 patients who received MSC treatment. Yet few sustained efficacy of MSC treatment was observed at the end of the 2-year follow-up period. Funding(s): The National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFA1105604, 2020YFC0860900), the specific research fund of The Innovation Platform for Academicians of Hainan Province (YSPTZX202216) and the Fund of National Clinical Center for Infectious Diseases, PLA General Hospital (NCRCID202105,413FZT6). [Figure presented]Copyright © 2023 International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy
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In this chapter we extend earlier work (Vinuesa et al., Nat Commun 11, 2020) on the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations (UN) for the 2030 Agenda. The present contribution focuses on three SDGs related to healthy and sustainable societies, i.e., SDG 3 (on good health), SDG 11 (on sustainable cities), and SDG 13 (on climate action). This chapter extends the previous study within those three goals and goes beyond the 2030 targets. These SDGs are selected because they are closely related to the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic and also to crises like climate change, which constitute important challenges to our society. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Overall survival (OS) is considered the standard clinical endpoint to support effectiveness claims in new drug applications globally, particularly for lethal conditions such as cancer. However, the source and reliability of OS in the setting of clinical trials have seldom been doubted and discussed. This study first raised the common issue that data integrity and reliability are doubtful when we collect OS information or other time-to-event endpoints based solely on simple follow-up records by investigators without supporting material, especially since the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic. Then, two rounds of discussions with 30 Chinese experts were held and 12 potential source scenarios of three methods for obtaining the time of death of participants, including death certificate, death record and follow-up record, were sorted out and analysed. With a comprehensive assessment of the 12 scenarios by legitimacy, data reliability, data acquisition efficiency, difficulty of data acquisition, and coverage of participants, both short-term and long-term recommended sources, overall strategies and detailed measures for improving the integrity and reliability of death date are presented. In the short term, we suggest integrated sources such as public security systems made available to drug inspection centres appropriately as soon as possible to strengthen supervision. Death certificates provided by participants' family members and detailed standard follow-up records are recommended to investigators as the two channels of mutual compensation, and the acquisition of supporting materials is encouraged as long as it is not prohibited legally. Moreover, we expect that the sharing of electronic medical records and the legal disclosure of death records in established health registries can be realized with the joint efforts of the whole industry in the long-term. The above proposed solutions are mainly based on the context of China and can also provide reference for other countries in the world. © 2022 The Authors
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As more and more people begin to wear masks due to current COVID-19 pandemic, existing face recognition systems may encounter severe performance degradation when recognizing masked faces. To figure out the impact of masks on face recognition model, we build a simple but effective tool to generate masked faces from unmasked faces automatically, and construct a new database called Masked LFW (MLFW) based on Cross-Age LFW (CALFW) database. The mask on the masked face generated by our method has good visual consistency with the original face. Moreover, we collect various mask templates, covering most of the common styles appeared in the daily life, to achieve diverse generation effects. Considering realistic scenarios, we design three kinds of combinations of face pairs. The recognition accuracy of SOTA models declines 5%–16% on MLFW database compared with the accuracy on the original images. MLFW database can be viewed and downloaded at http://whdeng.cn/mlfw. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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The effort for combating the COVID-19 pandemic around the world has resulted in a huge amount of data, e.g., from testing, contact tracing, modelling, treatment, vaccine trials, and more. In addition to numerous challenges in epidemiology, healthcare, biosciences, and social sciences, there has been an urgent need to develop and provide visualisation and visual analytics (VIS) capacities to support emergency responses under difficult operational conditions. In this paper, we report the experience of a group of VIS volunteers who have been working in a large research and development consortium and providing VIS support to various observational, analytical, model-developmental, and disseminative tasks. In particular, we describe our approaches to the challenges that we have encountered in requirements analysis, data acquisition, visual design, software design, system development, team organisation, and resource planning. By reflecting on our experience, we propose a set of recommendations as the first step towards a methodology for developing and providing rapid VIS capacities to support emergency responses.
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COVID-19 , COVID-19/epidemiology , Contact Tracing , Humans , PandemicsABSTRACT
Surface plasmon has a history of more than one hundred years since its birth and has been a brand new discipline-plasmonics. Localized surface plasmon in metal nanostructures can gain very strong near-surface electric field enhancement and has been applied to many types researches successfully. However, there is relatively less study of the interaction between localized surface plasmon and magnetic field in incident light. This paper calculates the near-surface electromagnetic field enhancement of metal nanosphere-nanodisc gap based on the previous achievement. This paper shows that under the excitation of the single tightly radially polarized optical beam, the metal nanodisc can produce localized surface plasmon breathing mode and electric dipole moment mode, which give rise to the longitudinal electric field enhancement at the nanodisc center. And then, because of the resonance interaction of the metal nanodisc and localized surface plasmon electric dipolar moment of the metal nanosphere, a gap mode of localized surface plasmon resonance with efficient longitudinal electric field enhancement can be produced. Through carrying out the numerical simulation, this paper demonstrates that the near-surface longitudinal electric field of metal nanostructure gap mode can obtain 250 times electrical field enhancement relative to the valid transverse electrical field that is used to excite the breathing mode, and the enhancement factor of near-surface magnetic field could be 170. In order to present more clearly the character of the spectrum and the near-surface electromagnetic field distribution of this new metal nanostructure, the near-surface electromagnetic field distribution and the resonant wavelengths of this new metal nanostructure are also studied. The calculation results show that the proposed metal nanosphere-nanodisc nanostructure owns an obvious advantage on the local near-surface electromagnetic field enhancement and a relatively large frequency spectrum. Due to the electromagnetic field enhancement advantage of the metal nanostructure proposed by this paper, the future is not without hope that the results here could be applied to more and more researches, especially biomedicine, and provide a bit of reference in order to fight for novel coronavirus. © 2022, Peking University Press. All right reserved.
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After the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, the industrial supply chain in different industries has exposed a series of problems. The Party Central Committee clearly pointed out that we should improve the stability and competitiveness of the industrial supply chain. The upstream and downstream automobile industry has a long industry chain with a complex supply system, and it has both shortcomings and advantages. In order to ensure the stability of the supply chain of China's automobile industry, analyze the bottlenecks of the industry and put forward corresponding solutions, this paper used big data to establish a supply chain database of independent brand automobile as a new analysis tool, to enhance the analysis accuracy, specify the measures and analyze the key links of China's automobile industry being controlled by others through the network diagram and risk rating table. Next, it is suggested to establish and improve the supply chain database of the whole automobile industry as soon as possible, improve the data collection and inter departmental coordination mechanism, and accelerate the establishment of a 'dual circulation' development pattern of a new system of automobile industry development in which domestic economic cycle plays a leading role while international economic cycle remains its extension and supplement. © 2021 IEEE.
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The outbreaks of SARS and COVID-19 have had a serious impact on public health, social economy and so on in China, in order to reveal the common law and difference characteristics of space-time transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and the reasons behind them, using space-time statistical methods, systematically analyzed and compared the difference characteristics of space-time transmission between SARS and COVID-19, and combined with the transmission characteristics of the virus itself and temperature, traffic and other factors to analyze the causes. The study shows that, ① SARS experiences two stages, the rising period-flat phase, and the COVID-19 experiences three stages, the rising period-sharp rise-slow up period. ② In the mode of spatial transmission, the transmission intensity and range of COVID-19 is greater than that of SARS, and the overall connectivity of COVID-19 is greater and the provinces are more closely related to the outbreak of the virus. Both SARS and COVID-19 transmission have obvious spatial aggregation characteristics. They are based on proximity propagation and long-range leaps, and SARS has a secondary communication center, and COVID-19 diffusion center has not been relocated. ③ In the direction of space communication, SARS is centered in Beijing, Hong Kong and Guangdong, the direction of spatial communication is stronger, and COVID-19 is only spread outwards with Hubei as the center. ④ In terms of spatial transmission speed, the spread time of the first case in each province of SARS is relatively large, and the spread time of the first case in each province of COVID-19 is roughly divided by Hu Huanyong Line, showing a phenomenon of "fast in the east and slow in the west", and the spread time span is relatively short. ⑤ R0 is the main reason for the difference between the spatial transmission range of SARS and COVID-19 and the speed of spatial transmission. The temperature suitability of SARS and COVID-19 viruses is different, but spatial aggregation transmission and adjacent area transmission are occurring in areas with similar temperatures. Besides the virus transmission capacity and temperature impact, traffic is the main reason affecting SARS and COVID-19 space long-range leap transmission, and the spatial transmission speed of both is negatively related to the density of the road network. 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.
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The COVID-19 pandemic continues to influence every aspect of human life across the globe. It was reported that vascular angiogenesis of COVID-19 was elevated in patients with equally severe influenza virus infection. In this issue of AJNMMI, Farolfi et al. reported that there was lung uptake not related to prostate cancer in almost all COVID-19 patients who performed Ga-68-PSMA-11 PET/CT scans and most of the lung uptake lesions were matched with typical CT patterns of COVID-19. With the advantages of having various tracers for whole-body imaging, PET provides opportunities to study the mechanism of COVID-19 from different aspects and obtain patterns of extra-pulmonary lesions in COVID-19, which helps explore more effective treatments for the patients. This case series opened the door to many future studies. Furthermore, such a multi-national/multi-institutional collaboration in the pandemic truly encouraged us that science is indeed without borders.
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Objective: Improving secondary school students’ knowledge and behaviors toward infectious disease prevention is key to promoting their health. In this study, we evaluated secondary school students’ infectious disease prevention literacy, determined the sources of knowledge acquisition, and identified deficiencies in education programs. Methods: A questionnaire was disseminated through social media from February 1-5, 2020, starting from selected class group chats of students in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Jiangsu provinces. A total of 1761 responses were collected. The male-to-female ratio was 1.08:1. The chi-square test was employed to analyze data. Results: Most respondents reported that they were familiar with the standard 7-step handwashing method. Most respondents reported that their knowledge and behaviors of infectious disease prevention were mainly acquired through the Internet. The vast majority of respondents believed that more education programs are needed in secondary schools. Conclusions: Secondary school students’ knowledge and behaviors toward infectious disease prevention need to be improved. Infectious disease prevention programs on campuses should be increased in quantity, enriched in scope, refined in form, and improved in coherence and continuity. © 2021, Paris Scholar Publishing. All rights reserved.
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Today, residents in all disciplines are expected to be involved in not just educating themselves but in the education of others and peers as well. They are involved in a wide spectrum of teaching and instruction techniques such as case presentations, lectures, practical hands-on teaching, bedside clinical tutorials, informal discussions and simulation-based training. Simulation-based teaching has been playing an increasingly important role in both residency training as well as medical school curricula. In particular, it appeals to adult learners as it very task-driven and task-oriented, it allows for constant active engagement during role-playing in simulated scenarios and enables repetitive practice until a certain level of mastery or competency is achieved. The SingHealth residents training in emergency medicine have been collaborating with and engaging medical students from the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, as the two entities for a common Academic Medical Center. They share many collaborative projects and activities, research as well as educational training programmes. However, with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, both face-to-face medical teaching as well as simulation-based teaching proved to be challenging. One alternative is to move these teaching collaborations and programmes onto the online platform. This study describes the experience of emergency medicine resident-educators who conducted emergency medicine computer-based simulations (CBS) in collaboration with a group of medical students from the Duke-NUS Emergency Medicine Student Interest Group during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2021 Malaysian Association of Education in Medicine and Health Sciences and Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia.
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The disease burden and economic burden of seasonal influenza is substantial in China, and the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has brought new challenges to the prevention and control of influenza. As a priority group of influenza vaccination, the elderly are at higher risk of influenza-associated severe symptoms and deaths, and they are more price-sensitive vaccine users with better cost-effectiveness of vaccination program. Therefore, a reasonable financing mechanism of influenza vaccination should be designed for the elderly to increase their vaccination rate. This study proposes three financing strategies of influenza vaccination for the elderly in China, trying to explore the distribution of vaccination costs among individuals, central government and local governments under different financing strategies, including the individual-central-local mechanism (strategy 1), the central-local mechanism (strategy 2), and the local payment mechanism (strategy 3). Strategy 1 is feasible and sustainable for most regions in the short term. Strategy 2 is conducive to further increasing the vaccine coverage rate of the elderly. Strategy 3 encourages local fiscal payments to help relieve the financial pressure of the central government. The results revealed a relatively heavy financial burden of influenza vaccination for the elderly, and it is recommended to promote the development of a multiparty co-payment mechanism gradually based on local conditions.
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COVID-19 , Influenza, Human , Aged , China , Cost-Benefit Analysis , Humans , Influenza, Human/prevention & control , SARS-CoV-2 , VaccinationABSTRACT
The iPhone was designed at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, but its parts were made by suppliers in 43 countries and six continents via an incredibly complex supply chain. The global supply chain is the epitome of the intensive drive for efficiency, necessitated by fierce global competition. China emerged as the center of the global supply chain and the de facto “factory of the world” after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001…. © 2020 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
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We are probably too early to discuss all the lessons we can learn from the fight against COVID-19. But let us start with the following six early ones…. © 2020 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting our lives in unprecedented ways. The Novel Coronavirus is very contagious with an R0 value estimated to be 2.5. That is, in the initial stage of the epidemic, every infected person will infect 2.5 people on average. Moreover, people can be infectious yet asymptomatic. There are several public policy strategies to deal with the growing pandemic…. © 2020 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
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In the face of the COVID-19 epidemic, 'classes suspended but learning continues' has made online learning a must-have option for students. In order to avoid too many difficulties in students' online learning process and improve students' participation, we built a learning design mode in the context of large-scale online teaching, and combined massive realtime live teaching with personalized asynchronous learning. We combine existing online teaching cases with personalized teaching that provides timely intervention to build a learning design mode and provide detailed teaching strategies for front-line teachers. The teaching practice data show that this learning mode can improve students' knowledge mastery ability, cultivate students' practical operation ability, and significantly improve students' learning efficiency. Finally, it reflects on the functional value of learning mode from three aspects: students' cognitive development, students' behavior development and teaching structure reform, which can provide some experience and follow by other teachers and teaching organizers. © 2021 IEEE.
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The main goal of this research was to determine the difference in the level of physical activity (PA) during the lockdown due to the COVID–19 pandemic, compared to the usual level of PA, in young adults-Kinesiology students. We included 222 participants from UNIZG and BSU. The total level of PA was assessed by an IPAQ SF questionnaire. The data, which were collected and processed by IPAQ SF, were reported as comparisons of median values and interquartile ranges. The analysis of IPAQ SF completed during the COVID–19 lockdown and the special government rules shows that UNIZG students' TOTAL PA MET-minutes/week median was 4259.00, while the TOTAL PA MET-minutes/week median for BSU students was 1805.00. After the lockdown, UNIZG students' TOTAL PA MET-minutes/week median was 5850.00, while the TOTAL PA MET-minutes/week median for BSU students was 2880.00. Our results show a remarkably higher level of PA after the lockdown than during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in both groups. Additionally, certain differences between the groups were noticed. More specifically, the results present higher values of PA for UNIZG students in comparison to BSU students, regardless of the time during or after the lockdown. This study observed the level of PA in Kinesiology students, who are presumably a more active population compared to the general population. The results suggest a much lower level of PA during the lockdown due to the COVID–19 pandemic, and we assume the drop in the PA level in the general population to be even greater. Although the short-and long-term effects of lockdown weren't observed and require special attention, we believe there is an urgent need to create and implement exercise-based programmes on a national basis all around the world in order to increase the level of PA after lockdown for the general population. © 2020, Drustvo Pedagoga Tjelesne i Zdravstvene Kulture. All rights reserved.
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Background The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in China has greatly impacted the radiotherapy (RT) strategy forbreast cancer (BC) patients, which might lead to an increased distressing psychological symptom. Thus, we performa multi-center cross-section survey aiming to investigate the prevalence of fears of cancer recurrence (FCR) andexplore predictors for FCR in BC patients referred for RT during pandemic. Methods: 542 BC patients who referredfor RT between 24 Jan and 30 April 2020 during pandemic were consecutively enrolled from 14 hospitals aroundChina including Yangtze Delta River Region, Guangdong and Shanxi province. Patients' sociodemographic,treatment information as well as psychological characteristics were collected using an information sheet, Fear ofprogression questionnaire-short form (FoP-Q-SF), Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale ( HADS) and EORTCQLQ-C30. The influence of pandemic on RT schedule was divided into four categories: “delay” was defined as >12weeks from surgery to RT in patients without chemotherapy or >8 weeks from last time of anti-tumor therapy(including chemotherapy and surgery) to RT in patients with chemotherapy;“Special normal” was defined thatpatients themselves believed to have delayed RT initiation but actually not;“Interruption” was defined as anyunplanned gaps in original RT regime and all other would be classified into “normal”. Another type of influence on th th Advertisement RT strategy was that patients had to shift planned RT hospital from Grade-A tertiary hospital to local hospitals.Univariable analyses of FCR were performed in a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) or student t-test orPearson correlation analyses and candidate variables with P<0.2 were included Hierarchical multiple regressionmodels to investigate predictors for FCR. Guangdong province was chosen as reference in models. Results 488patients with complete data were eligible for the present analysis and none of patients and their family members hadbeen diagnosed as COVID-19. The RT strategy was affected in 265 (54.3%) patients, including 143 with delayed RTinitiation, 66 with “special normal” schedule, 24 (4.9%) with RT interruptions, 19 shifting to local hospitals for RT, andthe remaining 13 being influenced on both RT schedule and planned RT hospitals. Most of patients with affected RTstrategy occurred in late January and February, when was peak of COVID-19 pandemic in China. The mean FCRscores was 24.83 (SD=8.554) and 84 patients (17.3%) were classified as dysfunctional level of FCR (sum score≥34). In univariable analyses, FCR were significantly higher in patients who received RT in Guangdong provinceand in hospitals with < 100 BC cases per year. In term of during pandemic, a significant difference in FCR wasobserved in terms of influence on RT schedule (p<0.001). and changes of hospital levels(p=0.009). There weresignificant correlations between FCR and anxiety/depressive in HADS or all five function scales (physical, role,emotional, cognitive and social) and global QoL in QLQ-C30 (p<0.001). Finally, the model explained 59.7% ofobserved variances in FCR and showed that influence of RT strategy during pandemic had significantly impacted onFCR (ΔR2=0.01, ΔF=2.966, p=0.019). Hospitals in Shanxi province (β=-0.117, p=0.001), emotional function(β=-0.19, p<0.001), social function (β=-0.111, p=0.006), anxiety (β=0.434, p<0.001) and RT interruption (β=0.071,p=0.035) were independent predictors for FCR. Conclusions RT strategy for BC patients was greatly influencedduring pandemic. RT interruption is an independent predictor for high FCR. Our findings emphasize the necessity toensure the continuum of RT in BC patients, and efforts should be taken to alleviate the FCR through psychologicalinterventions.