Blowing in the Wind: Use ofIncentive Spirometry in Preventing Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome for Patients with Moderate COVID

In December 2019, there was an outbreak of COVID-19. This is a pilot study which aims to evaluate whether the use of Incentive Spirometry(IS) has a clinical significance in preventing Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) among moderate COVID patients. IS, a lung expansion technique, which promotes sustained maximal inspiration helping patients by improving ventilation/perfusion mismatch and alveolar-PaO2 gradient. Prospective study involving 10 moderate COVID patients, aged 18-59 years admitted from November 2021-February 2022. Five were assigned under exposed(IS users) and five under non-exposed(non-IS users) group. Data were extracted on demographics such as age, gender, BMI and pre-morbid health status. Day of illness, admission chest radiograph, Arterial Blood Gas (PaO2/FiO2 ratio), oxygen saturation, vital signs and symptoms were obtained. The primary outcome was development of ARDS, with secondary outcome of further worsening of pneumonia and PaO2/FiO2 ratio on the 4th hospital day, preventing desaturations and shorter hospital stay. Outcomes from the exposed group were compared to the non-exposed group. IS- users were found to have improved PaO2/FiO2 ratio, improved Chest X-ray findings, shorter hospital day and earlier improvement of symptoms. Hence, IS use can be utilized as part of the management of COVID-19 patients during the initial stage of illness to avoid progression to ARDS.

Violence, images and memory in the New Coronavi-rus and good government Memories of the Covid-19 pandemic in Peru by Edilberto Jiménez

This article analyzes a group of images and tes-timonies compiled in Nuevo coronavirus y buen gobierno. Memorias de la pandemia de COVID-19 en Perú by the Ayacucho artist and anthropologist Edilberto Jiménez based on three axes: the repre-sentations of the virus in the popular imagination, the subjective and objective violence of the virus as captured in the drawings, and the construction of civil society agency in the face of this violence. We argue that this book embodies a restorative justice as well as a polyphonic testimony of how the pandemic made visible and accentuated the differences as inequalities in the most vulnerable citizens: women, children, elderly people from the poorest families of San Juan de Lurigancho, one of the districts with the highest extreme poverty in Lima. Thus, we underline the politicaltestimonial function of the book, the same one that aims at the creation of a memory about the health crisis. With all this, we conclude that Jiménez's book is a nec-essary contribution to re-understand the diverse effects of the pandemic in the areas of extreme poverty in Peru and also to reflect on the role of images to build a memory in which the protago-nists are the most affected. © 2022, National University of San Marcos. Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences. All rights reserved.

Epidemiological characterization of health workers sick with COVID-19. Cienfuegos Province, March 2020-September 2021

Background: health workers are the ones who remained on the front line of the response to COVID-19, so they were in greater danger in situations of potential exposure. Objective: to characterize health workers sick with COVID-19, from March 2020 to September the 30th, 2021, according to sociodemographic and epidemiological variables. to characterize sociodemographically and epidemiologically health workers sick with COVID-19, from March 2020 to September the 30th, 2021. Methods: Observational, descriptive cross-sectional study carried out in Cienfuegos. The universe was made up of all health workers diagnosed with COVID-19, during the study period. The variables were: age, sex, municipality of origin, occupational profile, clinical status at diagnosis, source of infection. The primary source for obtaining information was the database of the Health Surveillance Department of the Provincial Health Directorate. The processing was done using SPSS version 21.0. Results: the months with the highest diagnosis were July and August. The female sex was the most represented and the age groups of 25-34 and 45-54 years old. The Cienfuegos municipality was the one with the highest number of cases. Doctors and nurses were the most represented. The possible source of infection was extrainstitutional. 83.7% of the total cases showed some symptom. Conclusions: the largest number of health workers were infected in the peak months of the pandemic, but in most of them the infection occurred extra-institutionally.

Identifying Urban Agriculture Needs and Challenges for the Implementation of Green Labeling in Xochimilco, Mexico

The current global situation with a dominant economic development model producing social inequality, increment and intensification of urbanization has generated severe environmental degradation and an associated increase in the likelihood of pandemics. New strategies that strengthen sustainable food production are urgent in highly unequal countries as Mexico. In Mexico City, the most populated city of the country, a wetland system, named Xochimilco, still holds chinampas, a unique and ingenious food system dating from pre-Hispanic times. These days chinampas are the best example of urban sustainable agriculture production. Unfortunately, this system is under threat due to urbanization and industrial land-use changes. Among the strategies to promote sustainable modes of production and consumption is eco or green labeling, consisting of a voluntary environmental certification approach, and marketing and advertising tool, that can change producers' and consumers' behavior toward long-term sustainability. Although widely used, the benefits of green labels for producers are not always realized. This study aimed to learn more about the agro-ecological production process and commercialization challenges in Xochimilco and San Gregorio Atlapulco in Southern Mexico City to understand chinampa producers' needs and determine whether a green label can offer solutions in this vulnerable socio-ecological system, particularly suffering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemics. For this, a literature review and producers' mental model analysis based on network theory, were developed. Results show that non-resolved issues such as commercialization problems, consumers' unwillingness to pay a fair price, loss of healthy soil, and degraded water quality used for irrigation persist and can affect the benefits of a green label including to improve chinampa production and farmers' income. Farmers' current necessities comprised increasing profits, receiving financial advice to set prices of agro-ecological vegetables and production costs, among others. Under the current production and commercialization scenarios complying with the assessment cost of certification will be difficult for most producers;then, implementing the green label would probably fail to fulfill the benefits. Attending to former and persistent conflicts and satisfying chinampa producers' neglected necessities are essential before implementing any program. Copyright © 2022 Arroyo-Lambaer, Zambrano, Rivas, Vázquez-Mendoza, Figueroa, Puente-Uribe, Espinosa-García, Tapia-Palacios, Mazari-Hiriart, Revollo-Fernández, Jiménez-Serna, Covarrubias and Sumano.

CrowdSurge: A Crowd Density Monitoring Solution Using Smart Video Surveillance with Security Vulnerability Assessment

—Overcrowding and crowd density monitoring in various places and establishments are being implemented since the pandemic, which helps observe social distancing. This study is about the development of a crowd density solution by utilizing YOLOv4 and Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) called CrowdSurge. The practice of CCTV has been around for so many years with proven benefits. This has been combined with the state-of-the-art YOLOv4 algorithm that provides high video analytics and object detection performance. With the combination of the said technology and algorithm, it will serve as a smart surveillance system. A system and mobile application have been developed, and the YOLOv4 deep learning detection model was used to detect various set of scenarios considered to assess if the model executes according to the actions assigned in the experimental set-up. The browser-based application was tested using CVSS or Common Vulnerability Scoring system, which shows that the severity level of most vulnerabilities is low and has a minor impact on the system. Based on the overall usability testing and statistical results, the respondents are satisfied with both surveillance system and mobile applications developed in terms of functionality, usefulness, and aesthetics. Therefore, using the developed system in real-time surveillance can aid in crowd density reduction in an area. © 2022.

AMobileQoE: An SPL Framework to Measure the QoE of Android Applications

Mobile applications are increasingly present in most aspects of our daily life, satisfying the needs of information, communication, and entertainment. Different factors can degrade the performance of these applications or services, and users can undergo unsatisfactory experiences. To achieve acceptance of mobile applications by the user, it is necessary to consider the Quality of Experience, which allows to measure the quality of an application based on the user’s perception. This work presents AMobileQoE, an SPL framework to automatically generate the code necessary to analyse the QoE of mobile applications following the Design Science Research approach. It enables developers to generate more than a thousand different product configurations to measure QoE from a set of network, device, and user metrics. The CovidInfo application was developed to test the SPL framework in a real context with real users, showing the ease of integration and the lightness of the framework. Furthermore, a quality assessment was performed on AMobileQoE showing a high degree of modularity and variability. © 2022 River Publishers.

Mobile QoE exploration: An unsupervised field study in an Argentine Patagonian city

Mobile devices are the main Internet access means today. Smartphones' capabilities added to the growth of wireless networks, enable millions of people to take advantage of resources, contents and applications for different purposes on a daily basis a degraded performance can be produced by different factors and users can undergo unsatisfactory experiences therefore, Quality of Experience (QoE) is a research topic of wide interest, which provides methods to analyze the general acceptability of an application or service, as subjectively perceived by the end user. This perception can be influenced by users' expectations and their context the QoE can be analyzed through subjective metrics obtained from questionnaires and/or surveys and/or objective metrics calculated automatically from the device's properties and Quality of Service (QoS). This work presents the findings of an unsupervised field study conducted over 17 days in the city Rio Gallegos, Argentina, to explore mobile QoE. Furthermore, the correspondence between the objective observations and the users' opinions were analyzed to identify contextual conditions that can influence the obtained results. For this reason, the CovidInfo application was developed and publicly shared. Using their own mobile devices in everyday context, 31 users interacted with the CovidInfo application, recording values for eight objective metrics and users' opinion the total data set collected consisted of 16990 records the analysis of the CovidInfo application yielded positive results, while 89% of the registered values corresponded to a good QoE. This allowed establishing a relationship between the values recorded for the objective metrics and those of the users' opinion, both of which showed good values (88% and 97%, respectively). © 2020 IEEE.

Clinical-epidemiological characterization of pediatric patients admitted to isolation centers of cienfuegos province

Introduction: The pediatric population has not been the most vulnerable to COVID-19. Strict epidemiological surveillance and the strategies taken, allow to identify and perform a clinical-epidemiological analysis in this population. Objective: Characterize from the clinical and epidemiological points of view pediatric patients admitted to isolation centers. Methods: Descriptive and cross-sectional study of 316 infants who were suspected cases or contacts of people with COVID-19, in ages from 1 to 18 years and who were admitted to the isolation centers of Cienfuegos province, from March 11 to June 30, 2020. The variables used were: age, sex, suspected cases or contacts, month of admission, clinical symptomatology, and confirmed cases. The data were expressed in absolute and relative values. Results: 36.7% children, and 63.3% contacts were suspected;96.9% were referred from their health areas. Only 5 (1.6%) children were confirmed with the disease and all had favorable evolution. The ages from 5 to 9 and from 15 to 18 years predominated with 24.4% and 24.7%, respectively, without gender difference;64.9% were asymptomatic. The most common clinical symptoms were: cough (56.8%) and fever (55.9%). Only 9 patients (8.1%) had respiratory distress. Conclusions: This disease in the pediatric population of Cienfuegos province is not a health problem because of the low percentage of children confirmed with the COVID-19 in isolation centers. It is confirmed that one of the forms of transmission is person-to-person and isolation is vital for control and diagnosis. © 2021, Editorial Ciencias Medicas. All rights reserved.

COVID-19: clinical presentation in patients admitted to Pedro Kouri tropical medicine institute

Introduction: Upon appearance of the first COVID-19 cases in Cuba, early identification of patients at risk of developing severe forms of the disease became a necessity.

Minimizing the usage of SARS-CoV-2 lab test resources through test pooling enhanced by classification techniques

Testing is an effective practice to limit the spread of the SARS-CoV-2. PCR is an accurate method to detect SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals, but PCR lab test kits are scarce and expensive resources. Therefore, their usage should be optimized. Testing in batch (pooling) is a procedure that merges individuals' swabs, allowing group diagnosis without affecting the accuracy of the results. Savings on test kits depend on the prevalence of the disease, pool composition and size. We propose a novel approach for optimizing pooling to minimize the usage of lab test kits. We show that estimating the probability of an individual being infected by means of a binary classifier leads to improvements in the efficiency of pooling strategies. We use simulation to select the components of a new pooling strategy based on a classifier and evaluate our approach using a real dataset. © 2021 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

FenceBot: An Elderly Tracking App for Mitigating Health Risk Contacts

Mobile technologies have been providing noteworthy scenarios regarding elderly care, replacing the traditional phone calls and face-to-face caregivers by a myriad of sensors and communication networks supporting detailed activities monitoring. On the other hand, the recent COVID pandemic has been leading governments to adopt contact tracing apps aiming at controlling the virus spreading. However, that adoption has raised many legitimate issues regarding individual privacy, besides those related to the effectiveness of this kind of app. In this context, this paper presents FenceBot, a novel approach for safety monitoring of the elderly when outdoors. The elderly data are kept private whenever in normal conditions, and alerts are sent to relatives only on unsafe or contagious risk situations that would demand verification and actions. The proposed technology was evaluated with a discrete-event simulation and the outcomes provided a solid indication of its effectiveness regarding protection from contagious risks situations. © 2021 IEEE.

Experiences in fitting out of active investigation points in provincial borders against COVID-19 in cienfuegos province. (Suplemento especial.) [Spanish]

Introduction: Among the limiting measures for COVID-19 is to avoid the entrance of possible ill people from territories with ongoing transmission.