Are Africa on the Right Track to Prevent COVID-19? Reflections from African Business Magazine's Coverage of the COVID-19 Pandemic

African Business Magazine is one of market leaders in providing country supplements, industry reports and market intelligence on Africa. African Business was first published in January 1982. Its headquarters are in London. The monthly magazine covers business events, special reports which discuss specific sectors and industries across Africa. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic in March 2020, the monthly magazine published 64 reports or articles related to the COVID-19 status in Africa continent. This study tries to retrieve from these reports published on the magazine since March 2022 to study local perspectives on the pandemic event. Africa government's responses to the spread of the COVID-19 and impacts to economy and public health retrieved from the mass medias will be compared with WHO's guidelines under different stages since outbreak of the pandemic to verify whether African's COVID-19 prevention performance can be trusted. This study would add African's viewpoints to prevent COVID-19 under the limits of fragile health system to the existed pandemic studies. © 2022 ACM.

The Linkage Study on the Effect of Anti-Illness Spread and Perception Gaps between Government Policy Transmit and Poor People's Perception in Uganda

This study takes Uganda, Africa as the target country, and applies the Evidence-Based Approach and questionnaire survey method to convert Uganda government's propaganda for deferring the COVID-19 in 2020 into questionnaire for collecting poor people's 13awareness of the prevention of COVID-19. The survey is conducted in the Kampala, the capital of Uganda (The people in the rural areas) through the aid of church system. This study expects to provide more accurate means of communication to provide the credibility of the information to various level of people to make official announcement more convincible and trusted. © 2021 ACM.

[The clinical application of blood routine and liver and kidney function test in COVID-19 disease prediction].

Objective: To explore the clinical application value of routine indicators such as blood routine and liver and kidney function in auxiliary diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 patients. Methods: SNK-q and other methods were used to retrospectively analyzed the differences of blood routine test, liver and kidney function and other inflammatory indexes of 30 patients with covid-19, 29 patients with other viral pneumonia, 35 patients with influenza A/B and 25 healthy persons from January 28 to February 14, 2020 in Xiangya Hospital of Central South University. Results: The neutrophils count increased gradually in COVID-19 group, influenza A/B group and other types of viral pneumonia group, and the difference between COVID-19 group and other viral pneumonia groups was statistically significant(H=-19.064,P<0.05); The lymphocyte count decreased gradually in the control group, influenza A/B group, other viral pneumonia group and COVID-19 group. In addition, DB, UA and GLU were also different among groups. Subgroup analysis showed that there were statistically significant differences in N(F=9.581,t=-0.152,P<0.05), N%(F=5.723,t=-0.600, P<0.05), NLR(F=4.773, t=-1.161, P<0.05), PCT(F=17.464, t=-1.477, P<0.05)and CRP(F=7.656, t=-1.973, P<0.05) between patients with lung involvement +-++ and patients with lung involvement +++-++++. There were statistically significant differences in NLR(F=63.931, t=-2.815, P<0.01), AST(F=15.704, t=-1.930, P<0.01), ALT(F=35.551, t=-2.199, P<0.01), LDH(F=7.715, t=-2.703, P<0.05) and GLU(F=6.306, t=-5.116, P<0.05) between the light+common subgroup and the heavy+critical subgroup of COVID-19 clinical classification. Correlation analysis showed that clinical stage and imaging credit period were significantly correlated with NLR (r=0.406, P=0.026; r=0.397, P=0.030), ALT (r=0.403, P=0.049; r=0.418, P=0.047), LDH (r=0.543, P<0.01; r=0.643, P<0.01) and GLU(r=0.750, P<0.01; r=0.471, P=0.042). A total of 5 principal components were extracted from all the included indicators, and the comprehensive information extraction rate was 82.86%. Indicators of a large load included Ur, PCT and CRP in PC1; ALT, AST and GLU in PC2; N%, L%, L and NLR in PC3. It indicated that the indicators of acute infection, liver function and blood routine had certein warning effect on disease surveillance. The results of ROC curve analysis showed that the combined detection of N+TB+Urea was the best practice to distinguish COVID-19 and other viral pneumonia, while the combined detection of N+L+UA was the most effective solution to make a distinction between COVID-19 and influenza A/B patients. In the aspect of disease evaluation, NL+LDH+GLU+ALT combined detection represent the best diagnostic performance to distinguish the clinical stage of light+common type and heavy+critical type, achieving the AUC (ROC) to 0.904, with the sensitivity 75% and the specificity 100% at the cut-off value of 0.477. Conclusion: In addition to etiology and imaging examination, doctors can also improve the routine laboratory tests such as blood routine test, liver and kidney function to assist diagnosis and disease prediction of patients with respiratory tract infection.