Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Children's Psychosocial Well-Being: A Cross-Sectional Study in Saudi Arabia.

Background The impact of COVID-19 on children is a vital topic to cover since the quarantine lasted for months, and limited research explored this effect locally in Arab countries. We studied the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the psychosocial well-being of children aged 1-18 years who were living in Saudi Arabia during the time of the pandemic. Method A total of 387 participants' responses were collected using online questionnaires (valid and reliable) composed of three sections with open and close-ended questions by the child's legal guardians. This cross-sectional study was conducted in Saudi Arabia and targeted children aged 1-18 years of both genders using a convenience sampling technique. One questionnaire assessed the child's behavior and sleep pattern, while the other evaluated child's activity and social skills. We analyzed the data using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY). Results Half of the children were 1-6 years (196; 50.6%), and the caregivers of more than half (225; 58.2%) were mothers. Two-thirds (234; 60.5%) of the children were male. Apart from a poor appetite for food and eating (non-nutritional) junk food, which was not significant (p-value > 0.05), all other factors, behavior, sleep patterns, activity, and social skills, all other factors were significantly affected by COVID-19 (p<0.05). Conclusion This study found that the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on children's psychosocial well-being. It is recommended to implement actions that aim to enhance the ability of children to cope with challenges.

A higher order Galerkin time discretization scheme for the novel mathematical model of COVID-19

In the present period, a new fast-spreading pandemic disease, officially recognised Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has emerged as a serious international threat. We establish a novel mathematical model consists of a system of differential equations representing the population dynamics of susceptible, healthy, infected, quarantined, and recovered individuals. Applying the next generation technique, examine the boundedness, local and global behavior of equilibria, and the threshold quantity. Find the basic reproduction number R0 and discuss the stability analysis of the model. The findings indicate that disease fee equilibria (DFE) are locally asymptotically stable when R0 < 1 and unstable in case R0 > 1. The partial rank correlation coefficient approach (PRCC) is used for sensitivity analysis of the basic reproduction number in order to determine the most important parameter for controlling the threshold values of the model. The linearization and Lyapunov function theories are utilized to identify the conditions for stability analysis. Moreover, solve the model numerically using the well known continuous Galerkin Petrov time discretization scheme. This method is of order 3 in the whole-time interval and shows super convergence of order 4 in the discrete time point. To examine the validity and reliability of the mentioned scheme, solve the model using the classical fourth-order Runge-Kutta technique. The comparison demonstrates the substantial consistency and agreement between the Galerkin-scheme and RK4-scheme outcomes throughout the time interval. Discuss the computational cost of the schemes in terms of time. The investigation emphasizes the precision and potency of the suggested schemes as compared to the other traditional schemes. © 2023 the Author(s), licensee AIMS Press.

Snapshot of a Child and Adolescent Psychiatric ER during Pandemic

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted numerous fundamental systems ranging from businesses to education system. The long-term consequences of the Pandemic, namely virtual learning and prolonged social isolation are coming to fruition in Child/Adolescent-Psychiatric Emergency-Rooms (CAP-ER). Discontinuity of in-person attendance of schools has poorly impacted the mental health of children and adolescents (C&A) of lowsocioeconomic areas, who often rely on schools for meals, physical activity, and mental-health support. An increase in agitation, suicidal ideation, and a declining school performance has been observed in such situations. Objective(s): The primary objective of this study is to explore the increase in these symptoms as the presenting complaint in the psychiatric ER. Method(s): Between April to June 2021 a cross-sectional quality improvement (QI) study was done on children presenting to CAP-ER BronxCare-Hospital NY with psychiatric complaints. Concomitant substance use disorder was determined using CRAFT questionnaire. Result(s): Our data comprised 209 patients (84 M/125 F) with 79 children and 130 adolescents. Ethnicity: 116 Hispanics (56%), 84 African Americans (40%), and 9 others. The most common presenting complaints were aggression (111, 53%), suicidal ideation/ suicide attempt (50, 24%), acute exacerbation of chronic illness (7, 3.3%), accidental overdosage (5, 2.3%) and others (36, 17.4). Marijuana was the most used substance (34 patients). Conclusion(s): There has been a surge in severity of presentation of psychiatric disorders among children and adolescents, aggression so far, the most prevalent. Further studies are needed to delineate the social links with this high emergent load and pandemic.

Psychotic-like Experiences during COVID-19 Outbreak: A survey from Pakistan

Introduction: Despite the fact that adolescents have been at higher risk of distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, the effect of pandemic on psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) is not well described. Objective(s): The study's objective is to evaluate if PLEs are induced in young individuals aged 18-24 during the pandemic. Method(s):A total of 201 college students from Pakistan (ages 18-24) were recruited for a cross-sectional research. We investigated the incidence of PLEs in Pakistan during the pandemic, their links to socio-demographic factors, COVID-19-related characteristics, depression, anxiety, and sleep difficulties. Community Assessment of Psychic Experience's positive symptom component (CAPE), Patient Health Questionnaire, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale, and IBM SPSS 25 were used. Result(s): CAPE-Frequency and CAPE-stress were positively associated with PHQ total (p<0.0010);GAD total (p<0.001);time spent indoors due to COVID-19 (p<0.001). Psychiatric disorder other than bipolar disorder or psychosis (p<0.001 for CAPE-frequency and stress), family history of psychiatric disorders (p<0.001 for CAPE-frequency and stress), chronic medical disease (p=0.021 CAPE-frequency and p=0.026 CAPE-stress), illegal drug usage (p<0.001 for CAPE-frequency and stress) were associated with CAPE-Frequency and CAPE-stress. In linear stepwise regression analysis, the best model predicted CAPE-Frequency explained 77.4% of variance with the following variables: PHQ total (B=0.552, SE= 0.08, t=6.909, p<0.001), GAD total (p<0.001), duration at home (p<0.001), and psychiatric disorder in family (p<0.001). Conclusion(s): PLEs have been linked with anxiety and depression during the pandemic. Individuals with a mental condition, family history of psychiatric disorder, chronic medical illness, illicit drug use, and increased time spent at home experienced more PLEs and stress.

E-learning issues and solutions for students with disabilities during COVID-19 pandemic: Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan case study

In this research, approaches to making e-learning accessible to students with impairments were studied based on the authors’ experience at Jordan’s Al-Zaytoonah University. The educational, organizational, and instructional concerns are underlined when analyzing the university’s experience in giving access to online content. Furthermore, these difficulties must be addressed in order to create the necessary organizational change to effectively solve accessibility concerns. This study looked into the e-learning issues that 56 university students with disabilities had reported. Students reported issues with: accessibility to websites and learning course management systems;accessibility to digital audio and video;time management in completing online tasks;trouble handling data during lectures;and a lack of appropriate adaptive strategies in online questionnaires. Students also noted technical issues with using e-learning, instructors’ communication with e-learning, and their treatment of all students equally, overlooking the necessity of considering the needs of students with impairments. In this study, we present the problems raised by students with disabilities and how the e-learning affects students’ outcomes in the e-learning experience. We also make recommendations based on the students’ realistic special-needs experience at Al-Zaytoonah University in Jordan during the COVID-19 pandemic to inspire decision-makers in educational institutions and those interested in this field. © 2022, Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.

Clinico-epidemiological Profile of COVID-19 Associated Invasive Fungal Rhinosinusitis Reported in the Teaching Hospital of Diwaniya, Qadisiya Province, Iraq: A Case Series

Introduction: With the current COVID-19 pandemic, the increasing use of glucocorticoids has resulted in more adverse effects and secondary bacterial or fungal infections. Objective: To find out the clinic-epidemiological profile of patients having COVID-19 associated invasive fungal rhinosinusitis in Diwaniya teaching hospital- Qadisiya province - Iraq. Method: Retrospective case series study of 24 patients with COVID-19 who were admitted to Alshafa centre in Al-Diwaniyah Province from 1st of May 2020 to end of August 2021. Patients were moderate to severe COVID-19 received treatment according to local guidelines. Patients who developed signs and symptoms of nose and paranasal sinuses disorder were seen by otolaryngologists and treated by a multidisciplinary team if invasive mucormycosis and its comorbidities were detected. Results: Out of 24 patients, 8 were female and two patients were excluded because their histopathological examination hasn’t confirmed acute invasive fungal rhinosinusitis. The average age was 54 years old, they all had diabetes, 2 patients had chronic kidney diseases, and 2 patients had malignancy (leukaemia). Furthermore, 19 patients were with severe SARS-COV-2 while 5 patients had moderate symptoms. All patients were confirmed COVID-19 positive by PCR test. Conclusion: Invasive fungal infections of the nose and paranasal sinuses are highly lethal conditions with significant morbidity. Early recognition and high index of suspicion are needed in the case of COVID-19 patients who complain features of sinusitis with careful prescription of drugs that affect immune response in COVID-19 patients. Copyright (c) 2022: Author(s).

Enhanced Vaccine Recommender System to prevent COVID-19 based on Clustering and Classification

Due to the fact that countries are presently dealing with the third wave of COVID-19 pandemic and in present time, the data of vaccines for preventing COVID-19 has triggered massive information, it is vital to create a system that can assist decision-makers and health care practitioners in combating COVID-19 and to combat the problem of vaccine information overload is to provide patients with personalized vaccine recommendations. Because of the ability of recommender systems (RSs) that use Collaborative Filtering (CF) to interpret decision-maker expectations, methodologies, it widely used and direct them towards linked tools that are acceptable to recommend the suitable vaccine for the persons. In this paper, we adopted an Enhanced Vaccine RSs for preventing COVID-19, which is called EVRSs-19. EVRSs-19 face some problems such as sparsity and diversity of vaccines data. To overcome these problems, we adopted two proposals. First, use clustering of K-Means to cluster the persons in several groups according to vaccine types to cope with sparsity of vaccines data. Second, use the K-Nearest Neighbors classifier-depend model of CF to discover neighbors in each vaccine cluster to increase diversity. Evaluating the EVRSs-19 system implemented on vaccines data in two testing using some metrics and the findings of these metrics after running the clustering and classification show that the system of EVRSs-19 has a perfect structure. Such as recall (0.92), precision (0.89), diversity score (9). As the vaccines recommendation list progressed, NDCG and DCG for persons are decreased. © 2021 IEEE.

Impact of diabetes mellitus medications in some biomarkers of covid-19 infected patients

COVID-19 pandemic has been the source of most health problems in the last two years with high mortality rates and fluctuation recovery rates, recorded in different countries. The diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the multifactorial diseases that may be affected in the COVID-19 infected people. Present research was suggested to study the DM medications in some Biomarkers of COVID-19 infected patients. D-dimer and C-reactive protein (CRP) was used in the present work;the output of the distribution study subjects, according to DM patients shows there was 73% of infected COVID-19 is suffered from diabetes mellitus, and 27% was non-diabetes patients, the D-dimer levels were elevation in DM insignificant differences (p < 0.004). The CRP level was found in non-significant elevation in DM (p < 0.203). The DM patients enrolled in the present study were treated with three types of medications, metformin+ insulin, and insulin only. We found that in a group treated with insulin only have higher levels of d-dimer and lower levels in the group treated with metformin while the group that used both drugs, shows a high level but is lower than the group that used insulin only were significant (p 0.012). The CRP shows low levels in the group that used metformin only than others in non-significant differences (p 0.037). Also, our analysis of the relation between PCR results and DM-infected patients found that the positive results were high in the DM patients than non-DM patients in significant differences (Od 0.1037 CI95% 0.0116 to 0.9272 P 0.042). It can be concluded from finding that there was a strong association between DM and d-dimer, CRP, and these markers association with types of DM medications, and the DM cases should be careful to avoid COVID-19 infection, and the infection cases must be under hospital care. © 2021, Dr. Yashwant Research Labs Pvt. Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Advancement of artificial intelligence techniques based lexicon emotion analysis for vaccine of COVID-19

Emotions are a vital and fundamental part of life. Everything we do, say, or do not say, somehow reflects some of our feelings, perhaps not immediately. To analyze a human's most fundamental behavior, we must examine these feelings using emotional data, also known as affect data. Text, voice, and other types of data can be used. Affective Computing, which uses this emotional data to analyze emotions, is a scientific fields. Emotion computation is a difficult task;significant progress has been made, but there is still scope for improvement. With the introduction of social networking sites, it is now possible to connect with people from all over the world. Many people are attracted to examining the text available on these various social websites. Analyzing this data through the Internet means we're exploring the entire continent, taking in all of the communities and cultures along the way. This paper analyze text emotion of Iraqi people about COVID-19 using data collected from twitter, People's opinions can be classified based on lexicon into different separate classifications of feelings (anticipation, anger, trust, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust, and joy) as well as two distinct emotions (positive and negative), which can then be visualized using charts to find the most prevalent emotion using lexicon-based analysis © The Author 2021. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) that allows others to share and adapt the material for any purpose (even commercially), in any medium with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal

Ascorbic acid as an inhibitor for SARS-CoV-2 virus reproduction: a theoretical approach

In the present study, ascorbic acid's or Vitamin C's influence (VC) in inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 virus reproduction was investigated. Gaussian 09 with a basis set of 6-311G (d, p), MGL tools, DSV, and LigPlus software were used. According to the Total Electron Density (TED) and Millikan charges, the active sites for adsorption were determined. Further, the docking study had clearly revealed the role of VC in inhibition of the virus reproduction in accordance with binding energy (Eb) and ligand efficiency (LE). The vitamin's interaction with the virus's spikes may limit its replication or provide the immune system sufficient time to recognize the infection, which enhances the possibility of producing appropriate antibodies.

Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in children, management in a peripheral setting

IntroductionIn the context of the Covid 19 Pandemic Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) is an important new differential requiring consideration, this report describes 2 cases seen in a secondary paediatric centre setting.Case DescriptionCase 1: A 3 year-old boy presented with a four-day history of fever, malaise and decreased oral intake. The fever was persistent, it peaked at 40.8 C.Over 4 days he had had 2 vomits but no other symptoms. He had no significant medical history and no known history of Covid 19 disease. Physical examination revealed no source of fever.Case 2: A 14-month-old girl presented with a 1 day history of fever, malaise and decreased oral intake. She had no significant medical history and no known history of Covid 19 disease. No source of fever was evident on exam.Initial investigations included chest x-ray, urine culture, blood culture and throat/nasal swab for PCR for SARS CoV-2, all were negative.Their markers of inflammation were elevated and continued to rise with persistent fever, despite treatment with IV ceftriaxone.With no clear source of fever and no improvement, in consultation with the Infectious Diseases team in our tertiary referral hospital, we began treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), IV methylprednisolone and high dose aspirin for suspected MIS-C in Case 1, Case 2 was transferred to the tertiary centre for the same treatment at the ward level. With the IVIG infusion, all fever and symptoms resolved.An Echocardiogram was organised for each in the acute setting and repeated at 6 weeks, they demonstrated normal cardiac systolic and diastolic function with no evidence of significant coronary dilatation.Case DiscussionThough MIS-C is rare, with an incidence of 0.14% among children with SARSCoV-2 infection according to one Systematic Review (Hoang Et al. 2020), it is an important new differential which must be borne in mind in cases of fever with no clear source. Both of these cases had a negative PCR test for SARS CoV-2 and no history of Covid 19 disease. No serological testing for SARS CoV-2 was available in our hospital setting. But in accordance with RCPCH guidelines this does not exclude the diagnosis of MIS-CIn previous studies as many as 71% of cases of MIS-C required PICU admission (Ahmed Et al., 2020), however not all are severely unwell and may be stable enough to be managed on a ward setting as described above.

Corona Virus Disease-19 Clinical And Laboratory Characteristics Associated With Disease Severity In Patients Presenting At A Tertiary Care Hospital Of Peshawar

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease-19 has a wide range of clinical presentations and varied outcomes. It is a new disease and researchers are trying to explore its clinical presentation and outcome to know more about the course of the disease. The objective of the present study was to determine the clinical and laboratory characteristics of Coronavirus disease-19 associated with severity of the disease. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted at Rehman Medical Institute, Peshawar from April to August 2020. All patients presented to the hospital and were diagnosed as COVID-19 were enrolled in this study. Disease characteristics and clinical outcomes were noted in both mild and severe cases. Patients were divided into 2 groups based on the disease severity and a comparison was made between these groups in terms of demographics, lab parameters and outcomes. Data were analysed by using SPSS version 24. RESULTS: Out of 227 patients, 80.2% (n=182) were males while 19.8% (n=45) were females. The mean age of the patients was 54.44±14.35 yrs. 61.2% (n=139) had co-morbidities with diabetes being the most common. 26.9% (n=61) had severe disease and 18.1% (n=41) died.20.7% (n=47) had lymphopenia, 48.45% (n=110) had leucocytosis and thrombocytopenia was seen in 11.89% (n=27). CRP, D-dimers, ferritin and LDH were raised in 83.25% (n=189), 80.17% (n=182), 81.05% (n=184), 77.09% (n=175) of the patients respectively. Comparing our designated patient groups revealed that old age, comorbidities, leucocytosis, lymphopenia, raised inflammatory markers were associated with severe disease and that mortality was high in the severe disease group. CONCLUSION: Middle-aged males with comorbidities were the most affected subset of patients. Disease severity was associated with old age, comorbidities and certain lab abnormalities. The outcome was poor in case of severe disease. However, no gender correlation was found with disease severity.

An E-learning Portal Quality Model: From Al-Zaytoonah University Students' Perspective

The standard of e-learning is a compound of different quality factors quality dimensions. The researchers looked at the efficiency of e-learning from various angles and viewpoints. However, few works of literature study, specifically, the quality of e-learning portals or software. Besides, the students' or learners' opinions about this issue. In this research, we only focused on the quality of e-learning portals and technology and what factors and impact they have on e-learning in general from the students' perspectives. The results show that the students are more concerned about the usability and related factors because their learning process become depends fully on the e-learning portal as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2021 IEEE.

Assessment of the burnout level in health care worker during covd 19

Background: Health care workers are considered the first and real repelling line in the face of the COVID19 pandemic, and therefore they have an increased workload, and stress. Understanding risk for burnout is critical to supporting health workers and maintaining the quality of healthcare during the pandemic. Methods: A cross-sectional study design could be used to assessment the level of burnout during COVID 19. Included 1000 samples as a healthcare worker involved in the study by used of convenience sampling technic, The study has been carried out in Iraqi, conducted throughout the period of April 15th, to July 19th, 2020. A self-administered questionnaire and Maslach Burnout Inventory Human Service Survey were used to collect data. Results: Overall, burnout were high level among 59.9 % of the participants in the study. High workload and intention to leave were associated with burnout at statistically significant (P<0.05), and high significant relationship between demographic characteristics (age, gender, level of education, job title, work place ) and level of burnout (P<0.05). Conclusions: The high level of burnout identified among health workers is mainly related to the high workload and psychological stress fronting them during COVID 19, as well as the lack of personal equipment necessary to protect themselves from this epidemic.