Comparing Neutralizing Antibody Activity Over Time Between Naive and Convalesced COVID-19 Vaccinated Individuals (preprint)

Longitudinal data comprised of neutralizing antibody (NAb) activity measurements from subjects who received COVID-19 vaccinations were collected between November 2020 and April 2022. To detect differences between convalesced and naive groups with respect to the evolution of NAb activity since the subject's first COVID-19 vaccine, we initially fit a linear mixed effects model to only the decay section of NAb evolution. We conclude that NAb activity, when restricted to this region, behaves differently between these two groups, with the convalesced group generally having higher neutralizing antibody levels than the naive group. We then fit a nonlinear mixed effects model over the entire NAb progression using a system of ordinary differential equations described by dePillis et al. JTB 2023 as our structural component to the model. This analysis not only supports the claim that over the entire progression, NAb activity behaves differently for convalesced and naive groups, but aligns with the linear analysis in confirming that NAb decay is slower in the convalesced group than the naive group. Finally, we use the estimated parameters from the nonlinear mixed effects model to predict NAb progression for each subject from their last observed measurement to 100 days past this measurement.

Severity and Mortality in Maintenance Hemodialysis Patients Infected with COVID-19 Omicron Strain: a Single-Centered, Retrospective Study in China (preprint)

Purpose The aim of this study was to observe the characteristics of COVID-19 infected maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients, identify the risk factors for severe illness and mortality in this population, and establish a preliminary risk prediction model for severe COVID-19 infection of MHD patients.Methods We included patients who underwent long-term maintenance hemodialysis and were hospitalized for COVID-19 infection at our hospital from December 2022 to March 2023. We retrospectively analyzed their demographic characteristics, clinical manifestations, laboratory tests, hemodialysis-related information, treatment strategies and complications. The patients were divided into severe (heavy and critical) and non-severe (mild and moderate) groups. Logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards analysis were used to identify the risk factors for severe COVID-19 progression.Results The presence of cerebrovascular disease, elevated NLR, fibrinogen, and D-dimer are independent risk indicators for severe COVID-19 infection in MHD patients in early stage. The presence of diabetes, cerebrovascular disease, and elevated D-dimer and NLR were associated with mortality.Conclusion MHD patients have a high probability of developing into severe and critical COVID-19 infection, and NLR, fibrinogen, and D-dimer can serve as early warning indicators for severe and critical progression of COVID-19 infection. The presence of diabetes, cerebrovascular disease, elevated NLR and D-dimer levels attribute to worse clinical outcomes and increased mortality.

Chinese digestive surgery interns' learning quality and English reading proficiency during COVID-19 pandemic: Comparison between face-to-face versus WeChat teaching and learning.

Gastrointestinal clinical teaching is of vital important for gastrointestinal surgery interns. However, during COVID-19 pandemic, due to frequent lockdowns and essential social distancing policy implemented in China, face-to-face teaching was interrupted significantly. To find a cost-effective way to deliver medical education to ensure that teaching and learning would be continued and uninterrupted, many social media tools and mobile applications have been used in medical teaching and learning. WeChat has been frequently employed in teaching and learning in many disciplines in Chinese universities due to its powerful functions and free cost. This study compared Chinese digestive surgery interns' learning quality, English reading proficiency, and learning satisfaction in two teaching conditions: the traditional face-to-face teaching versus WeChat teaching via an experiment. The study recruited 60 final year clinical medical students, who were randomly and equally assigned into two groups: traditional face-to-face teaching versus WeChat teaching. Interns' learning quality and learning satisfaction were measured by Likert-scale questionnaires; and their English reading proficiency was measured by the reading section in a standardized English test. The results showed that interns in WeChat group had significantly higher learning quality on understanding mechanisms and current knowledge by both self-assessment and peer-assessment. WeChat group also outperformed face-to-face group on inferencing, details, and main ideas in English reading. With regard to learning satisfaction, WeChat group were higher on learning interests, learning objectives, learning format, and English reading proficiency than face-to-face group. However, interns did not differ in terms of their learning satisfaction on medical skills, which might indicate that WeChat had limitations on training interns' medical practical ability.

Serological response following COVID-19 vaccines in patients living with HIV: a dose-response meta- analysis (preprint)

Conclusions: We concluded that vaccine doses were associated with consistently improved the rate and risk ratio of seroconversion in patients living with HIV, highlighting the significance of booster vaccination for patients living with HIV. Objective: To quantify the pooled rate and risk ratio of seroconversion following the uncomplete, complete, or booster dose of COVID-19 vaccines in patients living with HIV. Method: Pubmed, Embase and Cochrane library were searched for eligible studies published from inception to 13th, September 2022. The pooled rate and risk ratio of seroconversion were assessed using the Freeman-Tukey double arcsine method and Mantel-Haenszel approach, respectively. Random-effects model was preferentially used as the primary approach to pool results across studies. This systematic review and meta-analysis protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42022359603). Results: In this meta-analysis, we comprehensively analyzed 50 studies with a total of 7160 patients living with HIV. We demonstrated that only 75.0% (56.4% to 89.9%) patients living with HIV achieved a seroconversion after uncomplete vaccination, which improved to 89.3% (84.2% to 93.5%) after complete vaccination, and 98.4% (94.8% to 100%) after booster vaccination. The seroconversion rates were significantly lower compared to controls at all the stages, while the risk ratios for uncomplete, complete, and booster vaccination were 0.87 (0.77 to 0.99), 0.95 (0.92 to 0.98), and 0.97 (0.94 to 0.99), respectively. Notably, meta-regression and subgroup analyses suggested that year of publication, study location and vaccine type could cause the difference of the pooled rate or risk ratio of seroconversion for patients living with HIV after complete vaccination. Sensitivity analysis did not much change the results. Conclusions: We concluded that vaccine doses were associated with consistently improved the rate and risk ratio of seroconversion in patients living with HIV, highlighting the significance of booster vaccination for patients living with HIV.

Clinical characteristics of 290 foreign-imported cases infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Chengdu, China

Objective: To analyze the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of foreign-imported patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Chengdu City.

Learning From Home: Widening Rural-Urban Educational Inequality and High School Students’ Self-Control in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic and School Closure

Worldwide school closures and remote learning have been implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. These measures’ impact on young populations’ academic achievements is unclear. This study (N = 1,736, ages 14–20 years, 53% female, and Chinese) analyzed academic examination scores for students at a high school in Eastern China between January and July 2020. Results showed that overall, students’ academic achievements appeared to be negatively affected amid a school closure. More importantly, students’ self-control was introduced as a moderating factor that partially accounted for this difference in the context of remote learning at home. These findings extended our understanding of school closures’ unequal impact on young populations. Education and social policies should respond to these challenges during times of crisis.

The Mediation of Exam-oriented Cultural Capital: Economic Capital and Educational Inequality of Chinese High School Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic and School Closures.

While children and adolescents' education has been significantly affected during the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures, how they are impacted remains unknown. Based on Bourdieu's theory, this paper aims to examine whether cultural capital mediates the association between economic capital and academic achievement during the crisis. Using a longitudinal dataset from the Chinese high school and the moderated mediation model, the result showed that economic capital had a total effect on academic achievement, especially on the students' academic ranks. Meanwhile, economic-related inequality in education seemed to be mediated by cultural capital. Interestingly, the finding further indicated that the indirect effect was mainly attributable to exam-oriented cultural capital, compared with quality-based cultural capital. we discussed the theoretical contributions and policy implications in the end.

Can resilience promote calling among Chinese nurses in intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic? The mediating role of thriving at work and moderating role of ethical leadership

Background Nurses working in the intensive care unit (ICU) clung tenaciously to their job during the COVID-19 pandemic in spite of enduring stressed psychological and physical effects as a result of providing nursing care for the infected patients, which indicates that they possessed a high degree of professionalism and career calling. The aim of this study was to explain the associations between resilience, thriving at work, and ethical leadership influencing the calling of ICU nurses. Methods From December 2020 to January 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, a cross-sectional survey of 15 provinces in China was conducted using an online questionnaire. A total of 340 ICU nurses (effective response rate: 64.89%) completed sufficient responses to be used in the study. Sociodemographic factors, job demographic factors, resilience, calling, thriving at work, and ethical leadership were assessed using the questionnaire. General linear modeling (GLM), hierarchical linear regression (HLR) analysis, and generalized additive model (GAM) were performed to examine all the considered research hypotheses. Results Resilience was positively and significantly associated with calling. Moreover, thriving at work partially mediated the relationship between resilience and calling. The indirect effect of resilience on calling was 0.204 (p < 0.0001), and the direct effect of resilience on calling through thriving at work was 0.215 (p < 0.0001). The total effect of resilience on calling was 0.419 (p < 0.0001). In addition, ethical leadership played a moderating role in the relationship between resilience and calling (β = 0.16, p < 0.05). Conclusion Greater resilience can positively predict increased calling among Chinese ICU nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, thriving at work is a mechanism that partly transmits the positive effects of resilience on calling. Overall, nurses possessing greater resilience tend to maintain thriving at work in the face of such adversity, further resulting in subsequently increased calling. Besides, findings suggest that there is stronger influence of resilience on calling among nurses working in an organization managed by an ethical leader. The current findings may offer two insights for nursing practitioners and policymakers in the postpandemic world. First, resilience training and intervention are necessary to foster nurses' sense of thriving at work in the nursing industry, further promoting career calling. Second, better training and effort on the development of ethical leadership for leaders in nursing practice are essential to encourage followers to engage in social learning of ethical behaviors and abiding by normatively appropriate conduct, further enacting prosocial values and expressing moral emotions.

Socioeconomic Status, Peer Social Capital, and Quality of Life of High School Students During COVID-19: A Mediation Analysis.

This paper investigates how peer social capital mediates associations between socioeconomic status and quality of life among adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using survey data and school administration records collected at a high school (N = 1,736) in a coastal province in China, the results demonstrate that adolescents' socioeconomic status is associated strongly with their quality of life. When students were learning at home during COVID-19 school closures, peer social capital exerted a mediating effect on the association between socioeconomic status and quality of life. Most importantly, while peer social capital rooted in the real world seemed to be related positively to higher quality of life, peer social capital in the virtual world led to lower quality of life. These findings suggest that peer social capital might manifest different impact mechanisms for adolescents during the pandemic. Theoretical contributions and policy implications are discussed in this paper.

Fabrication of subunit nanovaccines by physical interaction

Vaccines can improve the quality of human life by preventing the burden of infectious diseases. Also, vaccination is becoming a powerful medication for preventing and treating tumors. Various vaccines have been developed based on the origin of the antigens. Herein, we focus on the subunit vaccines whose antigens are proteins or peptides. The advantage of subunit vaccines is safety for recipients;however, the immunogenicity of subunit antigens is relatively low. Nanoparticular delivery systems have been applied to improve the immunocompetence of subunit vaccines by targeting lymph nodes, and effectively present antigens to immune cells. Moreover, adding appropriate molecular adjuvants may strengthen the antigens to elicit immune response. In this perspective article, we first elucidate the characteristics of immunity induced by subunit nanovaccines and then summarize the strategies to fabricate subunit nanovaccines with delivering materials. Herein we highlight non-covalent interaction to fabricate nanoparticular subunit vaccines.

Socioeconomic Status, Peer Social Capital, and Quality of Life of High School Students During COVID-19: A Mediation Analysis

This paper investigates how peer social capital mediates associations between socioeconomic status and quality of life among adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using survey data and school administration records collected at a high school (N = 1,736) in a coastal province in China, the results demonstrate that adolescents’ socioeconomic status is associated strongly with their quality of life. When students were learning at home during COVID-19 school closures, peer social capital exerted a mediating effect on the association between socioeconomic status and quality of life. Most importantly, while peer social capital rooted in the real world seemed to be related positively to higher quality of life, peer social capital in the virtual world led to lower quality of life. These findings suggest that peer social capital might manifest different impact mechanisms for adolescents during the pandemic. Theoretical contributions and policy implications are discussed in this paper.

Rational evaluation of various epidemic models based on the COVID-19 data of China.

In this paper, based on the Akaike information criterion, root mean square error and robustness coefficient, a rational evaluation of various epidemic models/methods, including seven empirical functions, four statistical inference methods and five dynamical models, on their forecasting abilities is carried out. With respect to the outbreak data of COVID-19 epidemics in China, we find that before the inflection point, all models fail to make a reliable prediction. The Logistic function consistently underestimates the final epidemic size, while the Gompertz's function makes an overestimation in all cases. Towards statistical inference methods, the methods of sequential Bayesian and time-dependent reproduction number are more accurate at the late stage of an epidemic. And the transition-like behavior of exponential growth method from underestimation to overestimation with respect to the inflection point might be useful for constructing a more reliable forecast. Compared to ODE-based SIR, SEIR and SEIR-AHQ models, the SEIR-QD and SEIR-PO models generally show a better performance on studying the COVID-19 epidemics, whose success we believe could be attributed to a proper trade-off between model complexity and fitting accuracy. Our findings not only are crucial for the forecast of COVID-19 epidemics, but also may apply to other infectious diseases.

Findings of the LoResMT 2021 Shared Task on COVID and Sign Language for Low-resource Languages (preprint)

We present the findings of the LoResMT 2021 shared task which focuses on machine translation (MT) of COVID-19 data for both low-resource spoken and sign languages. The organization of this task was conducted as part of the fourth workshop on technologies for machine translation of low resource languages (LoResMT). Parallel corpora is presented and publicly available which includes the following directions: English$\leftrightarrow$Irish, English$\leftrightarrow$Marathi, and Taiwanese Sign language$\leftrightarrow$Traditional Chinese. Training data consists of 8112, 20933 and 128608 segments, respectively. There are additional monolingual data sets for Marathi and English that consist of 21901 segments. The results presented here are based on entries from a total of eight teams. Three teams submitted systems for English$\leftrightarrow$Irish while five teams submitted systems for English$\leftrightarrow$Marathi. Unfortunately, there were no systems submissions for the Taiwanese Sign language$\leftrightarrow$Traditional Chinese task. Maximum system performance was computed using BLEU and follow as 36.0 for English--Irish, 34.6 for Irish--English, 24.2 for English--Marathi, and 31.3 for Marathi--English.

Single point mutations can potentially enhance infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 revealed by in silico affinity maturation and SPR assay (preprint)

The RBD (receptor binding domain) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus S (spike) protein mediates the viral cell attachment and serves as a promising target for therapeutics development. Mutations on the S-RBD may alter its affinity to cell receptor and affect the potency of vaccines and antibodies. Here we used an in-silico approach to predict how mutations on RBD affect its binding affinity to hACE2 (human angiotensin-converting enzyme2). The effect of all single point mutations on the interface was predicted. SPR assay result shows that 6 out of 9 selected mutations can strengthen binding affinity. Our prediction has reasonable agreement with the previous deep mutational scan results and recently reported mutants. Our work demonstrated in silico method as a powerful tool to forecast more powerful virus mutants, which will significantly benefit for the development of broadly neutralizing vaccine and antibody.

Interdisciplinary bridging response teams for field hospitals in Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this essay, we provide an overview of a social worker-led, interdisciplinary practice model designed to combine essential online psycho-social support and local community self-governance for COVID-19 patients with minor symptoms in quarantine field hospitals in the city of Wuhan from February to May 2020. The interdisciplinary bridging response teams (IBRTs) model was designed for congregating settings to bridge offline community mobilization and online interdisciplinary professional services. We discuss the two-tier structure and organization of the practice model, the professionals? roles and main tasks, and the key features that ensured the success of the model.

Epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 cluster in Jingzhou, Hubei

Objective: Cluster epidemic characteristics of COVID-19 in Jingzhou were analyzed to provide scientific basis for prevention and control.

Resumption of School After Lockdown in Covid-19 Epidemic: Occult Fracture on the Same Site of the Same Grade Adolescents (preprint)

Background：As the capital city of Hunan Province next to Hubei Province very closely, Changsha started Level 1 response of major public health emergency on January 23. After 75 days of lockdown due to Covid-19 epidemic, students in the 9th grade of junior high school started hard training for physical entrance examination. Case Presentation：We report three cases of occult fracture on the same site in adolescents of the same grade since resumption of school after lockdown in covid-19 epidemic. Three students in the 9th grade of junior high school who were facing the physical examination in two weeks are diagnosed the occult fracture of the distal femur. Conclusion：It is recommended that the students, parents, education providers and policy makers should all pay attention to the physical exercise of students that should be from a small amount to a medium amount and then to examination training. The sudden increase in the amount of exercise may cause hidden fracture of young people.