COVID-19 Breakthrough Infections among Patients Aged ≥65 Years in Serbia: Morbidity and Mortality Overview.

BACKGROUND: Vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 have shown effectiveness in the prevention of COVID-19. Breakthrough infections occur, and age has been shown to be one of the dominant risk factors for poorer outcome. This research focuses on characteristics of breakthrough infections in older adults. METHODS: This retrospective study was conducted for four months (March-June 2021) in the autonomous province of Vojvodina in Serbia on 11,372 patients using reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction or antigen-detection rapid diagnostic tests verifying COVID-19 in those aged ≥65 years. Demographics, comorbidities, disease severity, and final outcomes were evaluated in fully vaccinated compared to unvaccinated individuals. Individuals were divided into younger-old (65-74 years) and older-old (≥75 years) age groups and differences between those groups were further evaluated. Binary logistic regression was performed to identify independent predictors of poor outcome. RESULTS: By the end of the research, 51.3% of the population of APV 65-74 years, as well as 46.2% of those older than 74 years, were vaccinated. From the acquired sample, 17.4% had breakthrough infection. Asymptomatic forms were higher in both age groups of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated (3.9%-younger-old, 6.3%-older-old vs. 2.9%-younger-old, 3.9%-older-old). The same results were registered with mild symptoms (82.1%-younger-old, 68.1%-older-old vs. 76.3%-younger-old, 57.5%-older-old) (p < 0.001). The case fatality ratio of the vaccinated population was smaller than the unvaccinated population in both groups (3.1% vs. 7.9%-younger-old; 11.4% vs. 22.5%-older-old) (p < 0.001). The odds ratio for poor outcome in unvaccinated individuals was 2.3 (95% confidence interval, p < 0.001) for the total sample. CONCLUSIONS: An increase in asymptomatic and mild forms, as well as decrease in severe or critical forms and poor outcomes, were noted in the vaccinated population. Choosing to avoid vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 may increase the chance of poor outcome in older individuals.

Social Interaction & Service Robot for Hospital Wards

As the era of industrial revolution 5.0 has begun, most of the robots are developed to have cyber inter-physical functionalities which are deemed to replace human activities. However, robots are rarely being utilized in the health care sector. In a medical institution, countless activities and events are happening simultaneously. Most of these are very precise, lifesaving and are on a time constraint. Heavy machinery and equipment are required to execute such events which is time-consuming and inconvenient. The robot specified helps with regular processes occurring on a day-to-day basis in the institution such as taking vitals and sanitization as well as transporting products on the go intelligently and safely. This robot is good at mapping rooms using the internal GPS, the robot can effectively communicate and output simple messages with the patients via, a display screen. Human intervention plays a vital role in preventing the health care workers from coming in contact with the covid-19. © 2022 IEEE.

Risks of mucormycosis in the current Covid-19 pandemic: a clinical challenge in both immunocompromised and immunocompetent patients.

Mucormycosis, also called "Black Fungus", is a new cause for worry in the current Coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) pandemic. Mucormycosis is devasting due to its high rate of morbidity and mortality which is a great cause of concern. Mucormycosis, in general, affects immunocompromised patients including diabetic, people with malignancies, organ and stem cell transplants and people affected with pandemic diseases like covid-19. Diagnosis of Mucormycosis is often delayed either due to clinical complications or misdiagnosed as symptoms of other diseases, especially covid-19. This could delay the treatment protocol which results in the failure of treatment. Mortality rate due to secondary infections in covid-19 patients with uncontrolled diabetics and who are on steroid therapy can soon reach 100% if diagnosis and treatment doesn't happen on timely basis. Risk of Mucormycosis is not just in immunosuppressed patients, but immunocompetent people with late diagnosis are also prone to infection. In view of this, we present a comprehensive review on risks of Mucormycosis in immunocompromised and immunocompetent patients highlighting the epidemiology, forms of Mucormycosis, immune response against Mucorales, difficulties in diagnosis and challenges in treatment of Mucormycosis, with emphasis on covid-19 associated Mucormycosis. Importantly, we have discussed the precautions and care to effectively manage Mucormycosis in immunocompromised and immunocompetent patients. Thus, current review helps clinicians in understanding various risk factors in both immunocompromised (especially covid-19 patients) and immunocompetent patients which is critical in managing Mucormycosis in current covid-19 pandemic.

Recent Advances and Limitations in Management of COVID-19 - An Update (preprint)

In the last two years, SARS-CoV-2 infection, commonly called COVID-19, has taken a jump from being rarely talked about to becoming a household name. Making it to history as the 5th global pandemic, this public health crisis has taken millions of lives all over the world. Right from the time of identification of patient zero, the pandemic has been a series of waves of infection, causing a domino effect whose impact has been felt in all walks of life. Global efforts have been underway to combat this pandemic and minimize its repercussions, resulting in the development of efficient vaccines and drugs to control and treat the disease. However, making the benefits of these efforts available to everyone and walking the path towards the end of the pandemic remains a challenge. Keeping this in view, this review intends to present aspects of sequential development of the pandemic, different types of variants, risks associated with different categories of population, drugs currently in use, recent advancements in diagnostics and treatment, and the challenges that continue to remain in overcoming this pandemic. However, the task of controlling and managing the impact of such a massive pandemic goes well beyond the boundaries of what present-day technology in the field of medicine and health-care can offer. A collaborative and integrative approach between academic, scientific, social, and economic factors, along with close supervision and reinforcement of the current public safety protocols, can help to ensure a better management strategy to control the progression of COVID-19.

COVID-19 Fake News Detection Using GloVe and Bi-LSTM

Fake news detection is a key use case of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. With the advancement of technology, electronic content has become more significant and extensively used than ever before, resulting in a revival in the spurious news as well as tweets that seek quick attention. It is critical to achieve early detection and identification of misinformation in social media. In these difficult times of COVID-19 where the whole world is fighting a global pandemic, it is very important to provide people with genuine news and updates about the prevailing situation. The Twitter is flooded with tweets about COVID-19 and related news, but not all the information is factual and full of veracity. To classify this issue, a Deep Learning model is being proposed to classify misinformation about COVID-19 and related news. Pre-trained state-of-the-art GloVe model was used in the proposed method for converting tokens into vectors. Deep Learning models like RNN, LSTM, and Bi-LSTM were tested to obtain better results after preprocessing the data using basic NLP preprocessing techniques. Bi-LSTM model got a training accuracy as high as 99%. All the results are tabulated and cogently laid out in the latter section. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.