Neurological symptoms and neuronal damage markers in acute COVID-19: Is there a correlation? A pilot study.

A wide spectrum of neurological symptoms (NS) has been described in patients with COVID-19. We examined the plasma levels of neuron-specific enolase (NSE) and neurofilament light chain (NFL) together, as neuronal damage markers, and their relationships with clinical severity in patients with NS at acute COVID-19. A total of 20 healthy controls and 59 patients with confirmed COVID-19 were enrolled in this pilot prospective study. Serum NSE and NFL levels were measured by using the enzyme-linked immunoassay method from serum samples. Serum NSE levels were found to be significantly higher in the severe group than in the nonsevere group (p = 0.034). However, serum NFL levels were similar between the control and disease groups (p > 0.05). For the mild group, serum NFL levels were significantly higher in patients with the sampling time ≥5 days than in those with the sampling time <5 days (p = 0.019). However, no significant results for NSE and NFL were obtained in patients with either single or multiple NS across the groups (p > 0.05). Increased serum NSE levels were associated with disease severity regardless of accompanied NS in patients with acute COVID-19 infection. However, serum NFL levels may have a role at the subacute phase of COVID-19.

Venezuela in times of the Covid-19 pandemic: Social representations and the multi-level mitigation strategy. The emerging local economy in the Caroni municipality, Bolivar State

In March 2020, a pandemic was declared by COVID-19 and the governments of the world implemented the quarantine. We start from the premise that everything would depend on the social representations of the pandemic, a variable that also impacted the economy on all its scales. In Venezuela on March 16, 2020, the government decreed a radical quarantine that was restructured to a method called 7+7. The article shows the multilevel collective action of the socio-institutional actors with emphasis on the Bolivar State, of national and international economic importance due to its border link with Brazil. The field work was carried out in the Caroni municipality between March 2020 - December 2021, with a real-time research approach on the processes of interactions between the actors involved and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). As a result, the collective actions undertaken;between the levels of government and its institutions, the private sector and civil society were significant in containing the spread of the virus and maintaining the subsistence of the local economy. It is concluded that the 7+7 quarantine scheme and the actions at the local level resulting from the agreements between most segments of society were decisive. Finally, they will highlight the form and method for the management of information and communication that made it possible to clean up the norms, agreements, and functional rules in a pandemic in the midst of complex and confusing social representations

Coronavirus pleomorphism

The coronavirus is always idealized as a spherical capsid with radially protruding spikes. However, histologically, in the tissues of infected patients, capsids in cross section are elliptical, and only sometimes spherical [Neuman et al., "Supramolecular architecture of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus revealed by electron cryomicroscopy,"J Virol, 80, 7918 (2006)]. This capsid ellipticity implies that coronaviruses are oblate or prolate or both. We call this diversity of shapes, pleomorphism. Recently, the rotational diffusivity of the spherical coronavirus in suspension was calculated, from first principles, using general rigid bead-rod theory [Kanso et al., "Coronavirus rotational diffusivity,"Phys Fluids 32, 113101 (2020)]. We did so by beading the spherical capsid and then also by replacing each of its bulbous spikes with a single bead. In this paper, we use energy minimization for the spreading of the spikes, charged identically, over the oblate or prolate capsids. We use general rigid bead-rod theory to explore the role of such coronavirus cross-sectional ellipticity on its rotational diffusivity, the transport property around which its cell attachment revolves. We learn that coronavirus ellipticity drastically decreases its rotational diffusivity, be it oblate or prolate. © 2022 Author(s).