ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a surge in the generation of medical waste. Due to the transmissible nature of the Virus and the lack of effort at proper disposal, the safety of the front-line health workers, as well as the disposer, is at risk. Hence, to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, a system is proposed that uses a robotic arm for segregating medical waste automatically. The robotic arm is operable through voice commands, and the segregating operation could function in automatic and manual mode. The system uses the YOLOv3 (You Only Look Once) algorithm to detect and classify the medical waste and then uses the Robot Operating System (ROS) platform to pick up and drop the waste object into color-coded bins. For this research, the medical waste has been categorized into 4 types, and for each type, a color-coded bin has been used for segregation. Our system has achieved 94% training accuracy for the YOLOv3 model on a custom dataset, whereas the system's overall accuracy in automated mode was 82.1%, derived after 30 trials. In the case of manual mode, an average accuracy of 82.5% has been achieved for the same number of trials. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Contact tracing can play an important role in controlling infectious disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Containing the spread of COVID-19 is crucial in humanitarian settings such as in the Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. This manuscript describes the COVID-19 contact tracing activities undertaken by a group of researchers and implementers in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. The paper details the design and development of the Commcare 'Contact tracing and case monitoring app', subsequent implementation of the contact tracing activity, challenges faced during the implementation process, and the strategies adopted by the research team to overcome these challenges. The research team leveraged the suite of template applications for COVID-19 response developed by Dimagi in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Research partners organized a series of brainstorming meetings and workshops with relevant stakeholders to finalize the 'COVID- 19 contact tracing and case monitoring app' for final implementation. This app was implemented in 10 Rohingya camps from Ukhiya and Teknaf sub-districts of Cox's Bazar for 4.5 months from 1st January 2021 to 15th May 2021. Due to a restriction on internet availability in the Rohingya camps by the government of the host country, the research team had to adopt a manual approach to implement the contact tracing activity. During these 4.5 months, 249,452 individuals from 10 Rohingya camps were screened for COVID-19 case registration. Of all the screened individuals, 431 were identified as COVID suspected cases, and 77 were identified as confirmed cases. The research team experienced several implementation challenges such as inexperience of contact tracers with the nature of the work, convincing the community to register in a digital system, obtaining information around COVID-19 symptoms, and many cultural, linguistic, gender, and other social barriers. The team adopted challenge-specific mitigation strategies for the effective implementation of the activity. The modalities of operation adopted by the team engaged with this present intervention to overcome the difficulties experienced in its conduction can hopefully provide some guidance to future parties attempting to conduct similar activities in complex humanitarian settings.
ABSTRACT
Background: Assessing individuals’ knowledge and attitudes towards the Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) is essential for the related public health surveillance strategies. Although some of the studies were conducted in Bangladesh, none of these studies considered the social attitudes along with the awareness towards COVID-19. Because social attitudes may affect the mental health of COVID-19 patients. Therefore, the present cross-sectional study aims to assess the knowledge and social mindset toward COVID-19. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted via an online questionnaire, from 330 participants. Participants was purposefully selected who were Bangladeshi citizens age minimum 18 years of old, has internet connections and gave their consent to participate this survey. The measures included in this study were demographic data along with source of knowledge, measures taking for COVID-19 prevention, management, avoid affected person and places etc. All the data collected through survey were analyzed by SPSS-25.0. Mean, median, mode, percentages and 95% Confidence Interval with 5% margin of errors were calculated Results: Study indicating a high level of knowledge (95.5%) to COVID-19. Practically, Maximum respondents will avoid COVID-19 affected persons due to fear of infection 84% (95% CI: 80.0% to 87.1%) and fear of death 27.7% (22.9% to 32.5%) respectively. Another valuable point that about 71.8% (66.1– 76.7%) of them have the knowledge of the COVID-19 spreading process and around 56.4% (51.0–61.8%) of them know how to maintain necessary protection without avoiding COVID-19 affected person. This knowledge and attitude reflecting the belief that COVID-19 is controllable and containable. Conclusions: The finding suggests that health education interventions, public awareness-raising campaign should be directed by Government of Bangladesh (GoB) who may have knowledge gap or pessimism about COVID-19 infections and spread. © Journal of Xiangya Medicine. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Effective pandemic management requires understanding the level of community knowledge, attitudes of people, and preparedness towards COVID-19. This study aimed to assess gender differences regarding knowledge, attitudes and preparedness toward the COVID-19, among Bangladeshi adults. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was conducted March– April 2020 among 1050 Bangladeshi adults. A convenience sampling strategy was utilized, and the data were collected online through a self-administered questionnaire. Chisquared tests were used to identify the gender differences regarding knowledge, attitudes and preparedness towards COVID-19. RESULTS Respondents predominately used social media to inform themselves about COVID-19 (68.1%), and females used social media more than males (p<0.001). Females had higher levels of correct knowledge about staying home with sickness and symptoms to prevent the COVID-19 transmission (p=0.02). Males had a more negative attitude about staying out during the pandemic than females (p<0.001);men were less likely to take preventative measures than their female counterparts. Some people believed in misinformation like ‘COVID-19 can transmit via mosquitos’ (9.1%), and males had more incorrect knowledge regarding this (p<0.001). Moreover, 17.8% of the respondents thought that COVID-19 could spread in warm weather. CONCLUSIONS Males showed a higher tendency to believe the myths about COVID-19 than their female counterparts, which is alarming. Awareness programs should be emphasized, focusing on gender-specific pertinent information to ensure effective preventative measures. © 2022 Sultana M. S. et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0)
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic is evolving rapidly as an overwhelming burden on human health and health systems of many countries includes low resource settings like Bangladesh. The country is facing crisis and several challenges to manage confirmed and symptomatic cases with limited administrative and logistic support, inadequate governance and widespread panic and stigma throughout the country. As the number of persons with COVID-19 and death are increasing there is a potential of heightened mass panic, stress and discrimination in coming days which can be predicted from recent protests in different parts of the country, spread of rumors and falsehoods, non-scientific information, limitations in governance and growing discrimination towards certain group of population and professionals. As World Health Organization (WHO) speculated this trajectory of pandemic is uncertain, this emerging body of stigma and discrimination needs to be addressed by proper authorities, "infodemic" should be controlled by legal steps and mass awareness campaigns should be launched without further delays.