Current Practice in Occupational Therapy for COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 Conditions.

The onset of the pandemic highlighted the need for a review of rehabilitation practices to ensure coordinated, effective, and efficient services for people affected by COVID-19. This paper reports on a global survey highlighting the delivery of occupational therapy services to people with COVID-19/post-COVID-19 condition (PCC) and makes recommendations to facilitate quality service delivery for this population. An online cross-sectional descriptive survey was developed and distributed to the global occupational therapy community via member organisations and communication channels of the World Federation of Occupational Therapists to collect information for this study. The survey obtained qualitative and quantitative data from respondents who were occupational therapists or occupational therapy assistants regarding (i) demographic characteristics, (ii) work experience with persons with COVID-19 and PCC, (iii) modes of working, (iv) education and training, (iv) occupational therapy intervention provided to persons with COVID-19 and PCC, and (v) the perceived quality of the occupational therapy services provided. Findings indicate that respondents provided a range of occupational therapy interventions for people affected by COVID-19/PCC aligned with evidence-based practice guidelines. While respondents identified a strong role for occupational therapy and generally rated their services as effective, issues related to the accessibility of their services impacted quality and user satisfaction. The study highlighted the need to advocate for access to occupational therapy to facilitate engagement in desired and needed occupations for COVID-19 survivors. Other recommendations emerging from the findings include the need to develop, disseminate, and use research evidence for guiding services for people with COVID-19/PCC, create quality service standards, and ensure the availability of necessary resources and supports such as referral pathways and screening criteria, availability of staff, training, personal protective equipment, and assistive devices and technology.

Pattern of rape and femicide during COVID-19 lockdown: content and discourse analysis of digital media reports in Nigeria

Rape and associated femicide have stood out as the most typical forms of violence in Nigeria. There appears to be a paucity of information on the pattern of rape in Nigeria, particularly in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. We explored the pattern of rape and femicide incidences in Nigeria during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. A convergent mixed methods design, involving quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis was used to establish the pattern in rape and femicide incidences as reported in diverse digital media platforms. A total of 48 rape cases were investigated, of which 12.5% resulted in femicide. More than half (55.6%) of the rape victims were aged 11 to 20 and were predominantly female (97%). A large percentage (42.9%) of the rape perpetrators were between 31 and 45 years of age and were all male. The incidence of rape increased steadily from 5.1% in March to peak at 33.3% in June and declined sharply by the end of August 2020 to 5.1% with rape being more prevalent in Northern Nigeria. There is a need for urgent measures by relevant stakeholders to curtail rape in Nigeria.

Quality of service enabled network slicing model in 5G and the next generation virtualized networks

The demand for high-speed connectivity has increased globally. The covid-19 pandemic, which forced global lockdown and directly led to most of the global workforce to telecommute, dramatically exacerbated the need for quality mobile connectivity and high data rates. The 5th generation of mobile communication technology (5G), with its ultra-low latency and high bandwidth capacity, becomes a natural fit to overhaul communication infrastructure to meet the connectivity demands. Key to 5G's performance is network slicing, which allows for the 5G network to be segmented into virtual networks that can be used to serve specific industry verticals. To assure Quality of Service (QoS), our paper proposes a model that creates network slices with respect to QoS requirements for various industry verticals. The proposed model is designed and evaluated using a software simulation technique, and the results obtained show that QoS-enabled network slicing guarantees improved performance in terms of throughput and loss in highly varying network conditions. © 2021 IEEE.