Oral manifestations of COVID-19 infection

The aftereffect and consequences of COVID-19 are multiple and include dissimilar aspects, with a great negative impact on health systems and humanity. In this sense, having updated and relevant information favors the arduous confrontation with this pandemic. The purpose of this research is updating knowledge about the oral manifestations of COVID-19 infection. A bibliographical review was carried out. The search was carried out through Google Scholar, SciELO and other information sources from the Cuba Virtual Health Library. The impact of COVID-19 on oral health is determined by the patient's immune system, the pharmacotherapy they receive, and the pathogenesis of the virus. Symptoms of dry mouth, hypogeusia, dysgeusia, and ageusia predominate, even before respiratory symptoms. Other manifestations include oropharyngeal candidiasis;appear approximately in 5% of patients, days after diagnosis. The main oral manifestations related to COVID-19 reported in the literature are: hyposalivation, xerostomia, ageusia, hypogeusia, dysgeusia, herpetic lesions, and candidiasis.

Telehealth Care in a Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology Clinic During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care systems have increased their telehealth services to meet the changing public health needs. Before the pandemic, telehealth was used primarily in surgical specialties for postoperative visits and rural medicine. However, out of necessity, nearly all medical and surgical subspecialties incorporated this virtual technology to improve patient health care access in a short time. Few studies have addressed telehealth in pediatric and adolescent gynecology (PAG) to date. STUDY OBJECTIVE: To describe the large-scale utilization of telehealth visits, assess patient experience, and improve access to care in a large academic ambulatory gynecology PAG clinic METHODS: This retrospective, cross-sectional quality improvement study was performed by administering patient surveys and compiling aggregate data from the EPIC electronic health record in the Division of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology clinics at a single children's hospital between March 2020 and March 2021. Patient demographic characteristics, payer characteristics, visit type and purpose, and patient experience were reviewed. INTERVENTIONS: Wider expansion of telehealth in PAG clinics at a single institution RESULTS: A total of 6159 telehealth appointments were performed, involving 6 clinic sites and 9 providers. Telehealth visits constituted 50% of the total ambulatory volume (12,527). Most patients were located within the institution's state (99.5%), and the remaining called into their telehealth visits from a neighboring state. Most patients were 18 years of age or younger (73%). Video visits lasted 15-30 minutes and included routine follow-up (66.3%), new/consult visits (28.4%), postoperative visits (1.6%), and urgent follow-up (0.2%). The patient population was ethnically diverse by self-identification: 61.4% White, 38.4% Hispanic, 16% Black, 4.4% Asian, and 0.4% Native Hawaiian/American Indian/Alaska Native. Payer mix included self-pay (45.5%), private payer (32.2%), and Medicaid/CHIP (22.3%). Conditions seen ranged from menstrual management (71%) and routine preventive or acute gynecologic concerns (21%) to surgical evaluation for congenital anomalies, endometriosis, fertility preservation, and genital concerns or pelvic masses (8%). Telehealth visits met patient expectations for 87.3% of respondents. Patient-reported opportunities for improvement included improving set-up instructions and more consistent audio/video connections. Challenges identified by providers included difficulty utilizing interpreters, technology limitations, and privacy constraints during HEADSS examination. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates how a large, diverse volume of patients with PAG needs received appropriate care through a telehealth format during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patients were satisfied with the services, but opportunities for improvement were elicited to allow for continued refining of this health care delivery tool in the future.

Blockchain Technology Applied to Health Care Supply Chain

Supply Chain Management (SCM) has grown in the last years due to the changing and evolutionary environment. The SCM has become fundamental for gaining financial and social, among others, benefits. Currently, the traditional SCM mechanisms have some areas of improvement, such as the transparency and lack of information, long waiting times for information retrieval and data fidelity. The past months our daily lives have been changing in a drastic way due to COVID-19 and some industries were affected but with this change there has been some opportunities to improve. In this article we describe the main concepts about the blockchain technology, the smart contracts, and their main use. We talk about different areas that these technologies could help to improve in different ways of their internal and external processes. Our main discussion is the description and improvement in the performance inside a supply chain, how it could be possible to speed up the information sharing, how a smart contract could be applied to a consumer-supplier relationship in the healthcare supply chain and the benefits that it would bring to it due to the quick times that this area demands because of the nature of their transactions and operations that are critical to maintain the needs of the industry. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Pandemia y crisis del sujeto neoliberal: Algunas reflexiones sobre la emergencia del covid-19

This essay raises some reflections on how the spread of Covid-19 has generated a drastic change in the life of neoliberal modernity. The emergence of a crisis of the neoliberal subject has generated a process of ontological reinvention forced by public health measures such as confinement and quarantines imposed on a global level. © 2021 The Authors.

International and european legislation and standards for battery electric buses

The European Union is pushing forward its European Green Deal where sustainable mobility is one of the main areas of interest, especially after the COVID-19 crisis. The role of battery electric buses (BEBs) in public transit is key to achieve sustainable mobility and to reduce city pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, global warming. Standardization plays a key role to ensure the deployment of a safe, cost effective, energy efficient, sustainable BEBs fleet. Standardization of components, interoperability, generalized recharge possibility, and even the possibility of using the BEBs as controllable loads, with energy storage that can be returned to the grid, must be done. This paper presents the most relevant legislation at European level, the International and European standardization outline in the field of BEBs, and the most important standardization activities going on. It gives references to deal with the very high number of standards relevant for the BEBs and the related activities that are in constant update, from different standardization entities. © 2020 IEEE.

Playing the Pandemic between newsgames and playful simulation

The newsgames were conceived as video games created by the media to raise awareness among the community about topics of interest, a category that has traditionally ignored the informative value of other playful proposals that concern current issues and are better suited to the digital scenario in which the user’s experience takes precedence over journalistic rigor and production standards. The purpose of this work is to analyse how simulation games improve the acquisition of information on current social issues, through the study of the narrative, technical and emotional aspects of the mobile games applications about pandemics during the diffusion of COVID-19, and its relationship to user experience design. The conclusions show how the mechanics and playful dynamics of this type of game propose aesthetic experiences which stimulate the consumption of information on a subject of social interest, similar to the impact that newsgames intend to generate. The dynamic system of simulation games about pandemics is based on the user’s ability to make decisions based on the information assimilated, transforming the accumulated knowledge on the topic into a key to success for the player. © 2020, Estudios Pedagogicos. All Rights Reserved.

Two known therapies could be useful as adjuvant therapy in critical patients infected by COVID-19. / Dos terapias conocidas podrían ser efectivas como adyuvantes en el paciente crítico infectado por COVID-19.

Pneumonia caused by coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, has been spread around the world already becoming a pandemic. Unfortunately, there is not yet a specific vaccine or effective antiviral drug for treating COVID-19. Many of these patients deteriorate rapidly and require intubation and are mechanically ventilated, which is causing the collapse of the health system in many countries due to lack of ventilators and intensive care beds. In this document we review two simple adjuvant therapies to administer, without side effects, and low cost that could be useful for the treatment of acute severe coronavirus infection associated with acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2). VitaminC, a potent antioxidant, has emerged as a relevant therapy due to its potential benefits when administered intravenous. The potential effect of vitaminC in reducing inflammation in the lungs could play a key role in lung injury caused by coronavirus infection. Another potential effective therapy is ozone: it has been extensively studied and used for many years and its effectiveness has been demonstrated so far in multiples studies. Nevertheless, our goal is not to make an exhaustive review of these therapies but spread the beneficial effects themselves. Obviously clinical trials are necessaries, but due to the potential benefit of these two therapies we highly recommended to add to the therapeutic arsenal.