Changed Perceptions of Public Space through the Construction of Outdoor Bar Areas in the Course of the Conversion of Urban Areas during the Corona Pandemic, using the Example of Munich

This article deals with the change in the perception of public spaces due to the Corona pandemic. The focus is on the conversion of urban spaces through the construction of outdoor bar areas, a current and so far neglected issue from a scientific perspective. Against the background of the conceptual embedding of the concepts of public space and curb side dining areas (or synonymously: "Schanigärten”), the dealing with the latter in the study area of Munich is explained. In the context of the current situation in Munich, the influence of curb side dining areas on the perception of public space is first analysed by means of an explorative survey. The result of a conjoint analysis shows, among other things, a positive correlation between the presence of curb side dining areas and the perception of respective computer-simulated street scenes (with all possible combinations of the presence or absence of curb side dining areas, trees and parking spaces). In addition, a regression analysis is used to analyse the extent to which individual socio-demographic aspects (e.g., age, gender) and aspects of attitude (e.g., toward the conversion of urban parking lots) and behaviour (car use) influence perception. In a further step, specific street scenes are assessed using recent photographs from Munich in order to measure different aspects of perception as well. The evaluation of a semantic differential shows that street sections with "Schanigärten” are consistently perceived more positively (e.g. more interesting, safer, more inviting) than those without. Finally, and in the light of the Corona pandemic, the development of the "Schanigärten” in Munich is explained from an expert's perspective, before the article concludes with a summary and an outlook. © 2022 Austrian Geographical Society. All rights reserved.

Physiotherapy & Psychosocial Rehabilitation in Postcovid & Postconflict Era: New Roles with same Staff? (dispatch)

Waves of COVID-19 have been managed successfully within US, EU, Southeast Asia and Latin America, however, South Asia and Sub-saharan Africa still suffer new variants and EU fights with UK and United States of ,,new waves of old disease", postcovide or long covide syndrome. The aim of this communication and research is to prepare our auditors for the size and extent of postcovid systems and the importance of non-doctors and non-medicine experts in management of its consequences.

The effect of co-location on human communication networks

The ability to rewire ties in communication networks is vital for large-scale human cooperation and the spread of new ideas. We show that lack of researcher co-location during the COVID-19 lockdown caused the loss of more than 4,800 weak ties—ties between distant parts of the social system that enable the flow of novel information—over 18 months in the email network of a large North American university. Furthermore, we find that the reintroduction of partial co-location through a hybrid work mode led to a partial regeneration of weak ties. We quantify the effect of co-location in forming ties through a model based on physical proximity, which is able to reproduce all empirical observations. Results indicate that employees who are not co-located are less likely to form ties, weakening the spread of information in the workplace. Such findings could contribute to a better understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics of human communication networks and help organizations that are moving towards the implementation of hybrid work policies to evaluate the minimum amount of in-person interaction necessary for a productive work environment. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc.

Effect of manual and digital contact tracing on COVID-19 outbreaks: a study on empirical contact data.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions are crucial to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and contain re-emergence phenomena. Targeted measures such as case isolation and contact tracing can alleviate the societal cost of lock-downs by containing the spread where and when it occurs. To assess the relative and combined impact of manual contact tracing (MCT) and digital (app-based) contact tracing, we feed a compartmental model for COVID-19 with high-resolution datasets describing contacts between individuals in several contexts. We show that the benefit (epidemic size reduction) is generically linear in the fraction of contacts recalled during MCT and quadratic in the app adoption, with no threshold effect. The cost (number of quarantines) versus benefit curve has a characteristic parabolic shape, independent of the type of tracing, with a potentially high benefit and low cost if app adoption and MCT efficiency are high enough. Benefits are higher and the cost lower if the epidemic reproductive number is lower, showing the importance of combining tracing with additional mitigation measures. The observed phenomenology is qualitatively robust across datasets and parameters. We moreover obtain analytically similar results on simplified models.

Digital proximity tracing on empirical contact networks for pandemic control.

Digital contact tracing is a relevant tool to control infectious disease outbreaks, including the COVID-19 epidemic. Early work evaluating digital contact tracing omitted important features and heterogeneities of real-world contact patterns influencing contagion dynamics. We fill this gap with a modeling framework informed by empirical high-resolution contact data to analyze the impact of digital contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate how well contact tracing apps, coupled with the quarantine of identified contacts, can mitigate the spread in real environments. We find that restrictive policies are more effective in containing the epidemic but come at the cost of unnecessary large-scale quarantines. Policy evaluation through their efficiency and cost results in optimized solutions which only consider contacts longer than 15-20 minutes and closer than 2-3 meters to be at risk. Our results show that isolation and tracing can help control re-emerging outbreaks when some conditions are met: (i) a reduction of the reproductive number through masks and physical distance; (ii) a low-delay isolation of infected individuals; (iii) a high compliance. Finally, we observe the inefficacy of a less privacy-preserving tracing involving second order contacts. Our results may inform digital contact tracing efforts currently being implemented across several countries worldwide.

Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively (e.g., with a backend system, but possibly also with other citizens), voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: It allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion;and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allowthe user to share spatio-temporal aggregates-if and when they want and for specific aims-with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longerterm pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society. © 2020, University of Skovde. All rights reserved.