ABSTRACT
Introduction: Covid-19 pandemic had significant impact on stroke care management and reduced the number of stroke admissions. A delay in treatment resulted in a more severe stroke with higher morbidity and mortality. Objective(s): To determine impact of Covid- 19 on the total number of admissions of stroke patients, compare ischemic stroke standard of care and outcome before and during Covid-19 pandemic. Methodology: A retrospective record review study. Data of patients with radiologically and - /or clinically confirmed AIS in HUSM who were diagnosed from 1st March 2019-28th February 2021 were recorded. Those who fulfilled the criteria were included in the study. Result(s): 229 patients were involved in this study;114 (49.8%) patients in the pre-Covid-19 period, and 115 (50.2%) patients during Covid-19 period. NIHSS score was similar, 5.3 +/- (4.18) in 2019 and 5.9 +/- (4.42) in 2020. There was no difference in terms of onset to door time between the two groups. However, we noticed a significant delay of onset to door time in both groups: 1875.2 min (31.25) hours in pre- Covid-19 vs. 1827.1 (30.45) hours during Covid-19 group (t. test 0.17, p = 0.863). The waiting time to see an ED (in minutes) dropped from 25.3 (30.21) during pre -Covid-19 period vs. 22.6 (16.48) in Covid- 19 group (t. test 0.48, p = 0.402). Door to CT brain time was 83.8 (58.91) vs 92.4 (120.20) during pre-Covid and Covid group (t. test -0.69, p = 0.493). There was a sharp decrease in patients who seek thrombolytic therapy from 7(6.1%) during pre-covid-19 to 4 (3.5%) during Covid-19 period (p = 0.354). As physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy assessment, the results are as follows;(77.2% vs. 81.7% p = 0.372), (76.3% vs. 81.7% p = 0.334), (50% vs. 59.1% p = 0.185), (43.9% vs. 45.2% p = 0.894) respectively. The duration of hospital stay was (6.4 +/- 4.5 vs. 7.5 +/- 6.74 (t. test -1.36, p = 0.175). MRS score at discharge was [2.8 (1.38) vs 2.9 (1.49)] (t. test -0.33 p = 0.742) for pre-Covid-19 and during Covid-19 group. Conclusion(s): The Covid-19 pandemic had no significant impact on stroke management and neurological outcomes for patients seeking treatment in HUSM.Copyright © 2023
ABSTRACT
MySejahtera is an application developed by the Malaysian government to assist and monitor the Covid-19 flare-up that happened in Malaysia by allowing users to assess their health risk in the event of an outbreak. In MySejahtera, the public obtains significant information about the affected areas and other health-related conditions. The use of MySejahtera became mandatory during the pandemic to reduce the Covid-19 spread. This paper reports the public sentiment towards MySejahtera using the supervised Machine Learning (ML) method. The total number of feedback scraped from Twitter, Google Play Store, and App Store was 33 376, and the modelling was trained using 20 647 feedbacks based on the timeline during the launch of the application;26th March 2020 until 25th November 2021. The corpus was used to determine the feedback label, either positive or negative. The tested ML algorithms are Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes (NB) through evaluation metrics that are accuracy, precision, recall/sensitivity, and specificity. The result of modelling shows that the SVM classifier with 90:10 percentage split, using Vader extraction technique, has the highest accuracy of 89.93% and recall/sensitivity of 90.55%. The results of this sentiment analysis are visualized for better understanding. It is preferable to utilize a Malay Language corpus and to have more records from Twitter for future work. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Due to Coronavirus disease, many new norms are being introduced and one of them is a social distancing. This article focuses on the comparison of technologies that can be adopted in developing a smart queueing system that cater the social distancing issue. Several technologies are discussed in this paper are including ultra-wide band, RFID, NFC, Geo-fence, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The discussion is based on the technology specification and how those technologies can assist in enforcing social distancing in queueing process or activity. © 2021 Author(s).