Socioeconomic Effects of COVID-19 in Mexico: A Multisectoral Approach and

The health crisis caused by the spread of COVID-19 has caused a profound social and economic disruption in Mexico. Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to the knowledge about the economic impact of the pandemic in Mexico and to evaluate social policy options to mitigate its effects. We do so based on a multisectoral-multiplier model and the most recent Social Accounting Matrix for Mexico, with which we estimate the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 as well the likely effects of two alternatives for mitigating them: an uncondition- al cash transfer scheme for households living in poverty, and the establishment of an unemployment insurance program for workers who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. We find that the first alternative alleviates more value added and loss of income, and thus has a greater effect in reducing inequality and the incidence of poverty.

An Environmental Construction and Demolition Waste Management Model to Trigger Post-pandemic Economic Recovery Towards a Circular Economy: The Mexican and Spanish Cases

The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry consume 40% of raw material generating 35% of industrial waste worldwide. In the EU, it consumes 50% of raw material and generates 35% of industrial waste;while in the USA, 22% of 600 million tons of Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) were recycled into new products: 52% as aggregates but 24% ended in landfills, in 2020. A transition to a circular economy may trigger post-COVID-19 economic recovery. Thus, the EU promotes it through the EU Green Deal, Renovation Wave and Circular Economy Action Plan. This work applies the Spanish CDW “weighted transfer of measurement” current model to broaden its construction material database and to add environmental indicators. Latin America has the world's highest urbanization rate (84%) but lacks effective CDW management to thrive in Regenerative Sustainability, Climate Change mitigation and post-pandemic economic recovery. This research quantifies onsite 61 Mexican social housing CDW, comparing both countries’ results. Mexico consumes 1.24 ton m−2 of raw materials and produces 0.083 ton m−2 CDW with a 16% recycling rate, while Spain consumes 1.90 ton m−2 and produces 0.08 ton m−2 with a 75% recycling rate. Cement-based, ceramic and mixed CDW represent 83.44% for Mexico and 95.61% for Spain. The implementation of this methodology will deliver sustainable CDW management in Mexico, minimizing CDW production, by the replacement of current construction materials for eco-efficient ones and the promotion of related legislation. Moreover, this updated transformation coefficient database widens the Spanish model to an international scale. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

COVID-19 Related Pneumonia Detection in Lung Ultrasound

Accurate diagnosis plays an important role in the current public health situation caused by the Covid-19 outbreak. Ultrasound images offer some advantages over other imaging techniques due to their lowers costs;however, to the authors’ knowledge, these type of images have not received as much attention as the other methods. This article describes a set of novel features for Covid-19 detection from lung ultrasound scans, obtained from the Pocovid database described in [3]. Two simultaneous approaches were considered: analysis and segmentation of the pleura, and highlighting of information from frame sequences through PCA and ICA. The proposed features were tested using machine learning models, achieving an average accuracy of 0.9, which considering the interpretability of the features and the complexity of the classification models used, is a good result. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

COVID-19 is a new disease caused by the beta coronavirus SARS-CoV-2

The first registers of atypical pneumonia were reported in China by the end of December 2019. The disease was rapidly disseminated in the entire world. The spectrum of the clinical manifestations is large going from individuals without any symptoms to those who develop multisystem disease and death. It has been demonstrated that hypertension and diabetes are more frequent in people with COVID-19 and the presence of diabetes is associated with an increased risk of more severe disease and higher mortality. In the present article, we review the possible mechanism why the diabetes patients have an increased risk of mortality by COVID-19 and recommend preventive actions that must be implemented in the general population and particularly in individuals with diabetes. © 2020 Academia Nacional de Medicina. All rights reserved.