ABSTRACT
Background. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis infections rose in the US for 6 consecutive years before the COVID-19 pandemic. Patterns of sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing during the COVID-19 pandemic have yet to be fully assessed. Methods. We performed a retrospective study of STI testing in the Veteran's Health Administration (VHA) healthcare system during each calendar year 2019-2021 using electronic health record data. We determined the number of chlamydia (CT) and gonorrhea (GC), and syphilis tests performed overall and in demographic groups defined by age, birth sex, self-reported race, region, and HIV status. Results. VHA performed 202,503 CT tests, 201,314 GC tests and 250,790 syphilis tests in 2019, followed by a 23% and 25% decrease in 2020 for CT/GC and syphilis testing, respectively. We observed decreases among all subgroups defined by age, sex, race, and geography. Race groups with the biggest decreases in 2020 include Asian Americans (-28%) and Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (-27%). By 2021, overall testing rates demonstrated a partial recovery to 89.8% of their 2019 levels. Testing rates in 2021 in rural/ highly rural residents remained 17% below baseline, compared with 10% for urban dwellers. Veterans living in the Northeast, South, or Midwest had the least recovery among geographic regions (16%, 11% and 11% below baseline, respectively). People with HIV experienced a decline in CT/GC testing of 15% but by the end of 2021 this had recovered to 1.9% below baseline. Women experienced both a steeper drop and a smaller recovery in CT and GC testing relative to men Conclusion. After dramatic reductions in STI testing during the COVID-19 pandemic, rates returned to near-baseline levels nationally by 2021. Testing rates have lagged in some patient groups, most notably rural and highly rural populations, women, and Black and Asian American Veterans, placing them at risk for disparities in STI diagnosis, and therefore treatment. Testing rates in Veterans under age 25 years have reached or exceeded pre-pandemic levels. (Figure Presented).
ABSTRACT
Social distance monitoring (SDM) systems are vital in fighting the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19). Existing SDM systems employ bounding box-method, which imposes inaccurate distance estimation due to the high variance in its output coordinates. To solve this problem, an SDM system based on multitask cascaded convolutional neural networks (MTCNN) is proposed. Instead of using bounding box coordinates, face detection and facial landmarks localization of MTCNN is used to provide fixed coordinates and increase the distance estimation accuracy of SDM. However, while the accuracy issue is solved by using MTCNN, the SDM system suffer from large computational requirements due to the cascaded networks added on top of the distance estimation process. To deal with this challenge, a constrained optimization technique is employed to each stage of MTCNN with the goal of reducing its hardware requirements while keeping the same reliability as the original implementation. Experimental results show that the SDM system based on the optimized MTCNN achieves higher accuracy performance with reduced computational requirements as compared to conventional SDM systems. This allows the proposed SDM system using optimized MTCNN to be deployed efficiently on edge devices. IEEE
ABSTRACT
We analyze short-term media trust changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, their ideological drivers and consequences based on panel data in German-speaking Switzerland. We thereby differentiate trust in political information from different types of traditional and non-traditional media. COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment, in which citizens’ media trust at the outbreak of the crisis is compared with the same variables after the severe lockdown measures were lifted. Our data reveal that (1) media trust is consequential as it is associated with people’s willingness to follow Covid-19 regulations;(2) media trust changes during the pandemic, with trust levels for most media decreasing, with the exception of public service broadcasting;(3) trust losses are hardly connected to ideological divides in Switzerland. Our findings highlight that public service broadcasting plays an exceptional role in the fight against a pandemic and that contrary to the US, no partisan trust divide occurs.
ABSTRACT
With the online-everything transformation accelerated by a global Covid-19 pandemic, we may finally find ourselves on the verge of the next potentially paradigm-shifting step after the mobile Internet: The Metaverse. Among others, the Metaverse will utilize head-mounted devices (HMDs) and extended reality (XR), including but not limited to virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), as the medium to connect avatars and users in the real world. In addition, the Metaverse is supposed to provide gamified experiences around emerging Web 3.0 technologies and is anticipated to be the precursor of the so-called Multiverse, which will serve as an architecture of advanced XR experience realms. In this paper, we focus on the anticipated 6G post-smartphone era, where smart wearables such as VR/AR HMDs are increasingly replacing the functionalities of smartphones. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we first extend Metaverse's primary focus on VR/AR to Multiverse's advanced XR realms of experience. Next, we gamify and implement all eight Multiverse realms of experience using Oculus Quest 2 and Microsoft HoloLens 2 as state-of-the-art VR/AR HMDs, experimentally investigating and comparing the performance of a (ii) single-player origami game and (iii) multi-player maze game across our proposed integrated VR/AR HMD and Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd-of-Oz (CoZ) platform.
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A case of a 56-year-old man with severe COVID-19 infection who later developed septic shock because of disseminated cryptococcemia. This is the first published case of culture proven non-human immunodeficiency virus nontransplant COVID-associated Cryptococcus neoformans meningitis. Profound immunological impact of COVID-19 has been observed with associated increased risk of developing opportunistic infections.
ABSTRACT
Objective: Angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is the cellular entry point for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)-the cause of COVID-19 disease. However, the effect of RAS-inhibition on ACE2 expression in human tissues of key relevance to blood pressure regulation and COVID-19 infection has not previously been reported Design and method: We examined how hypertension, its major metabolic cophenotypes and antihypertensive medications relate to ACE2 renal expression using information from up to 436 patients whose kidney transcriptomes were characterised by RNA-sequencing. We further validated some of the key observations in other human tissues and/or a controlled experimental model Results: Our data reveal increasing expression of ACE2 with age in both human lungs and the kidney. We show no association between renal expression of ACE2 and either hypertension or common types of RAS inhibiting drugs. We demonstrate that renal abundance of ACE2 is positively associated with a biochemical index of kidney function and show a strong enrichment for genes responsible for kidney health and disease in ACE2 co-expression analysis Conclusions: Our results indicate that neither hypertension nor antihypertensive treatment are likely to alter the expression of the key entry receptor for SARSCoV-2 in the human kidney. Our data further suggest that in the absence of SARSCoV-2 infection, kidney ACE2 is most likely nephro-protective but the age-related increase in its expression within lungs and kidneys may be relevant to the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
ABSTRACT
The currently deployed contact-tracing mobile apps have failed as an efficient solution in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. None of them have managed to attract the number of active users required to achieve efficient operation. This urges the research community to re-open the debate and explore new avenues to lead to efficient contact-tracing solutions. In this paper, we contribute to this debate with an alternative contact-tracing solution that leverages the already available geolocation information owned by BigTech companies that have large penetration rates in most of the countries adopting contact-tracing mobile apps. Our solution provides sufficient privacy guarantees to protect the identity of infected users as well as to preclude Health Authorities from obtaining the contact graph from individuals. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
ABSTRACT
Objective: to assess the prevalence of depression, anxiety, stress and the sleep quality among nursing professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: this quali-quantitative study was conducted with 104 professionals from a private hospital in Paraná, Brazil, in July 2020. Data were collected using three instruments: the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21), the Leeds Sleep Evaluation Questionnaire (LSEQ), and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Results: 48% of the personnel showed signs of depression, 52% signs of anxiety and 52% signs of stress. As for sleep quality, 75% had sleep disorders, and 68% reported insomnia with a mean PSQI of 6.88. Conclusion: although the percentage of personnel with sleep and stress disorders was smaller than in the literature, the levels of anxiety, insomnia and depression were higher, corroborating the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of nursing personnel. © 2021, Centro de Estudos da Faculdade de Enfermagem da UERJ. All rights reserved.