ABSTRACT
Background: Novel coronavirus disease (SARS-COV-2 infection or COVID-19) is a respiratory tract infection that has been linked to severe acute respiratory syndrome transmitted particularly through touching and respiration. The purpose of this study is to understand the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 cases in a typical tourist-related outbreak and explore the possible route for its transmission. Method(s): All data and epidemiological survey reports of COVID-19 cases in the outbreak were reported by provincial and urban (county) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health Commissions nationwide from October 16th to November 5th, 2021. The epidemiological survey reports included information on gender, age, source of infection (imported from other provinces or locally acquired), daily life track and itinerary, date of symptom onset, and date of diagnosis. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistical methods, one-way analysis of variance, independent t-test, and Chi-square tests. Histograms and percentage stacked area plots were used to describe the epidemiological characteristics of the outbreaks. Result(s): The COVID-19 outbreak associated with the tourist groups has involved 551 COVID-19 cases, with a median age of 44 years (interquartile range: 30-59 years), gradually spreading from the northwestern region to the national level across 15 provinces of China. One-fifth of the cases (16.0%) had traveled to Ejin Banner, resulting in 68 second-generation cases. We estimated an outbreak on 11 flights and 19 trains, accounting for a total of 27 confirmed cases. In addition, 42 clusters of outbreak cases were also reported to occur, 21 (50.0%) in households and 10 (23.81%) in restaurants. About 106 confirmed cases were related to the gatherings in restaurants. The median incubation period for this COVID-19 outbreak was 7 days (inter-quartile range: 5-10 days). Conclusion(s): The survey results indicated that this COVID-19 outbreak originated in Ejin Banner and was spread by tourist groups, which was a typical infection outbreak promoted by travel. Our results further confirmed that travel needs to be more strictly weighed in pandemics like COVID-19, and people need to pay more attention to the prevention against infectious diseases, particularly when traveling in a tourist group.Copyright © 2022 Zheng et al.
ABSTRACT
Background: Novel coronavirus disease (SARS-COV-2 infection or COVID-19) is a respiratory tract infection that has been linked to severe acute respiratory syndrome transmitted particularly through touching and respiration. The purpose of this study is to understand the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 cases in a typical tourist-related outbreak and explore the possible route for its transmission. Method(s): All data and epidemiological survey reports of COVID-19 cases in the outbreak were reported by provincial and urban (county) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health Commissions nationwide from October 16th to November 5th, 2021. The epidemiological survey reports included information on gender, age, source of infection (imported from other provinces or locally acquired), daily life track and itinerary, date of symptom onset, and date of diagnosis. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistical methods, one-way analysis of variance, independent t-test, and Chi-square tests. Histograms and percentage stacked area plots were used to describe the epidemiological characteristics of the outbreaks. Result(s): The COVID-19 outbreak associated with the tourist groups has involved 551 COVID-19 cases, with a median age of 44 years (interquartile range: 30-59 years), gradually spreading from the northwestern region to the national level across 15 provinces of China. One-fifth of the cases (16.0%) had traveled to Ejin Banner, resulting in 68 second-generation cases. We estimated an outbreak on 11 flights and 19 trains, accounting for a total of 27 confirmed cases. In addition, 42 clusters of outbreak cases were also reported to occur, 21 (50.0%) in households and 10 (23.81%) in restaurants. About 106 confirmed cases were related to the gatherings in restaurants. The median incubation period for this COVID-19 outbreak was 7 days (inter-quartile range: 5-10 days). Conclusion(s): The survey results indicated that this COVID-19 outbreak originated in Ejin Banner and was spread by tourist groups, which was a typical infection outbreak promoted by travel. Our results further confirmed that travel needs to be more strictly weighed in pandemics like COVID-19, and people need to pay more attention to the prevention against infectious diseases, particularly when traveling in a tourist group. Copyright © 2022 Zheng et al.
ABSTRACT
Distributed Spatial Cloaking () enables users to enjoy precise Location-Based Service (LBS) with location privacy-preserving. An incentive mechanism is necessary to encourage users to cooperate. However, due to the inappropriate design of incentive mechanisms, the existing works cause low user benefits and fail to encourage users, ruining the expected incentive effect. Moreover, introducing a third party to manage users’information also causes the existing works to disclose users’privacy and be unpractical. To address these issues, we propose a utility-awaRe incEntive mechanism based diStributed spATial cloaking (RESAT). By the idea of utility theory and optimization theory, RESAT devises basic and extended incentive mechanisms. The two mechanisms for assuming that all users are honest and that malicious users provide unreasonable locations. RESAT proposes an incentive mechanism-based cloaking cooperation without a third party, incorporating the developed mechanisms based on the blind signature. Theoretical analysis indicates that RESAT achieves incentive compatibility and is secure. Extensive experiments on the real dataset show that compared with the existing works, RESAT enables 1 time more users to cooperate at best while eliminating the malicious behaviors that provide unreasonable locations. The required construction time delay is limited. IEEE
ABSTRACT
Acquiring the spatial distribution of users in mobile crowdsensing (MCS) brings many benefits to users (e.g., avoiding crowded areas during the COVID-19 pandemic). Although the leakage of users’location privacy has received a lot of research attention, existing works still ignore the rationality of users, resulting that users may not obtain satisfactory spatial distribution even if they provide true location information. To solve the problem, we employ game theory with incomplete information to model the interactions among users and seek an equilibrium state through learning approaches of the game. Specifically, we first model the service as a game in the satisfaction form and define the equilibrium for this service. Then, we design a LEFS algorithm for the privacy strategy learning of users when their satisfaction expectations are fixed, and further design LSRE that allows users to have dynamic satisfaction expectations. We theoretically analyze the convergence conditions and characteristics of the proposed algorithms, along with the privacy protection level obtained by our solution. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority and various performances of our proposal, which illustrates that our proposal can get more than 85% advantage in terms of the sensing distribution availability compared to the well-known differential privacy based solutions. IEEE
ABSTRACT
Since December 29, 2019, the world has been suffering from a serious pandemic disease, the COVID-19. Given its universal availability, social media platforms, such as Weibo, provides the public with frequently updated health information to support the virus containment work. The health information posted by the health authorities (government, hospital, and medical experts) is expected to urge individuals to take protective actions. To investigate whether there is a significant impact of media coverage on protective behaviors and further on pandemic transmission, we collect a panel dataset to conduct an empirical analysis. Our preliminary results show that the volume of all media coverage has a significant containment effect on pandemic transmission. In particular, verified publishers have greater containment effect than unverified publishers. In the future, we will use instrument variables or matching methods to examine the causal effects. © Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Information Systems (IS) for the Future, PACIS 2020. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Abstract: Autopsy is of great significance to the elucidation of the pathological changes, pathogeneses and causes of death of corona virus disease 2019 ï¼COVID-19ï¼ and can provide theoretical basis for more scientific and accurate prevention and control of the outbreak. Based on related laws and regulations, such as the Law of the People's Republic of China on Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases, the clinical manifestations and epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19, and the related guidelines on the prevention and control of the outbreak, combined with the practical work of forensic pathology examination, the Guide to the Forensic Pathology Practice on Death Cases Related to Corona Virus Disease 2019 ï¼COVID-19ï¼ ï¼Trial Draftï¼ has been developed. This guide includes information on the background investigation of the cases, autopsy room requirements, personal prevention and protections, external examinations, autopsy, auxiliary examinations, and so on. This guide can be used as a reference by forensic and pathological examination institutions, as well as examination staff.