Sociopsychological Factors Related to Information Seeking during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objectives: To limit the risk of contracting the coronavirus, it is crucial for individuals to attain accurate COVID-19 related information. Once they are equipped with such information, they can engage in risk preventive behaviors. This study aimed to examine the sociopsychological factors predisposing individuals' information-seeking intentions. Method(s): Based on the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model, we hypothesized that individuals perceiving the risk of COVID-19 were likely to seek risk-related information through increased affective response (i.e., anxiety and fear) and information insufficiency. We considered perceived information gathering capacity as a moderator in the prediction of information-seeking intention. Using an online survey platform, study participants were recruited from US adults. Multivariate linear regressions were conducted in a hierarchical fashion while controlling for numerous covariates. Result(s): A total of 510 responses were included in our analyses. Respondents' mean age was 46.6+/-17.8 years;about half (53.3%) were females. Results showed that respondents' perceived risk provoked affective responses (regression coefficient (b) = 0.8417, 95% CI [0.7408, 0.9426]), which then increased self-perceived information insufficiency (b = 0.1857, 95% CI [0.0859, 0.2855]). This finding indicated that after perceiving the risk of coronavirus, individuals experienced worry and fear associated with the risk. Such affective responses made them realize that their current COVID-19 related knowledge was insufficient. Also, respondents who acknowledged information insufficiency were motivated to seek information about the coronavirus (b = 0.1099, 95% CI [0.0198, 0.1999]). The relation between information insufficiency and information-seeking intentions was moderated by perceived information gathering capacity (b = 0.0070, 95% CI [0.0001, 0.0151]), indicating that individuals with a higher capacity of gathering information were more likely to intend information seeking. Conclusion(s): Study findings suggest the importance of interventions to promote information seeking for individuals with a low information gathering capacity. Policy makers and clinicians assist the public in obtaining accurate information from reliable sources.Copyright © 2023

Pre-Paid Phone Distribution to People With Substance Use Disorder

Introduction: People with substance use disorders (SUD) face significant phone insecurity and high rates of phone turnover. As U.S. healthcare delivery models expanded towards telehealth due to the COVID-19 pandemic, consistent access to a working phone became a critical tool for healthcare engagement. As part of the COVID-19 response, our institution distributed free pre-paid phones to patients with SUD who did not own a phone starting April 2020 from multiple addiction specialty access points (inpatient addiction consult service, low-barrier bridge clinic, infectious disease drop-in center and integrated psychiatry and SUD program). We sought to evaluate the real-world implications of this intervention for patients with SUD who received these pre-paid phones by assessing their change in 30-day healthcare utilization pre- vs post-phone receipt and conducting an exploratory analysis to assess self-reported attitudes towards phone ownership. Method(s): We conducted a retrospective cohort study of 181 adult patients with SUD who received a pre-paid phone between April 2020 and February 2021 from our institution. Our primary outcomes were the change in healthcare utilization of in-person outpatient visits, telemedicine visits, and telephone encounters (incoming or outgoing phone calls answered by the patient) 30 days before and after receiving the pre-paid phone. To assess self-reported phone utilization and attitudes to phone ownership we did an exploratory analysis from a subset of patients (n = 141) using a telephone survey post-phone receipt. We used descriptive statistics where appropriate and paired t-tests to assess the change in healthcare utilization measures. Result(s): 181 adult patients with SUD received pre-paid phones, 64.6% male, 66.3% 30-49 years old, 62.4% white, 81% were experiencing homelessness, 90% had opioid use disorder and 60% had stimulant use disorders. We found substantial and statistically significant increases in change in 30-day pre-post telemedicine (mean change = 0.38, SD = 0.99;P < 0.0001) and telephone encounters (mean change = 0.31, standard deviation (SD) = 1.13, P = 0.0003), while there was a small increase though non-significant change in outpatient visits (mean change = 0.09, SD = 1.50, P = 0.45). For our exploratory analysis using patient telephone surveys, 141 patients were contacted a mean of 2.7 months after phone distribution;16.3% (23/141) answered the phone on a single attempt and 48% (11/23) completed the survey. Survey results showed that 6-months preceding pre-paid phone receipt, patients had a mean of 2.73 phones and 2.55 unique phone numbers and the majority perceived phone ownership as extremely important and it contributed to a general sense of safety. Pre-paid phones also facilitated medical appointment attendance. Conclusion(s): Pre-paid phone distribution to patients with SUD during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with an increase in healthcare utilization including telemedicine encounters. Further studies are needed to understand and optimize the impact of pre-paid phone distribution as tools for healthcare engagement among people with SUD.

Automating Care: Online Food Delivery Work During the CoVID-19 Crisis in India

On March 23, 2020, the Government of India (GoI) announced one of the strictest nationwide lockdowns in the world to curb the spread of novel SARS-CoV-2, otherwise known as CoVID-19. The country came to a standstill overnight and the service industry, including small businesses and restaurants, took a massive financial hit. The unknown nature of the virus and its spread deepened anxiety among the general public, quickly turning to distrust towards any "outside"contact with goods and people. In the hopes of (re)building consumer trust, food delivery platforms Zomato and Swiggy began providing digital solutions to exhibit care towards their customers, including: (1) sharing delivery workers' live temperatures alongside the workers' profile inside the app;(2) mandating the use of the controversial contact tracing app Aarogya Setu for the workers;(3) monitoring workers' usage of masks through random selfie requests;and (4) sharing specific worker vaccination details on the app for customers to view, including vaccination date and the vaccine's serial number. Such invasive data gathering infrastructures to address public health threats have long focused on the surveillance of laborers, migrants, and the bodies of other marginalized communities. Framed as public health management, such biometric and health data gathering is treated as a necessary feature of caring for the well-being of the general public. However, such datafication practices - ones which primarily focus on the extraction of data from one specific community in order to mollify the concerns of another - normalizes the false perception that disease is transmitted unidirectionally: from worker to the consumer. By centering food delivery workers' experiences during the pandemic and examining the normalization of such surveillance in the name of care and recovery, this paper aims to examine how new regimes of care are manufactured and legitimized using harmful and unethical datafication practices. © 2022 ACM.

Clinical Characteristics of Patients Living with HIV Hospitalized for COVID-19

Background. Limited data exists regarding the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on people living with human immunodeficiency virus (PLWH). The purpose of the study was to compare the clinical outcomes of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and HIV versus those without HIV. Methods. This was a retrospective, cohort study of adult patients admitted with confirmed COVID-19 from March 1st to May 30th 2020 at an urban hospital in New York City. Data collected included demographics, past medical history, HIV status, baseline laboratory values, treatment and outcomes such as length of stay, mechanical ventilation, patient disposition at discharge, and in-hospital mortality. Fisher's exact test was used to compare categorical values and a t-test was used to compare continuous values. Results. Out of 983 patients, 6.9% were PLWH and 93.1% were HIV-negative. The average age in both groups was 61 vs. 62 years, respectively. There were more male patients in the PLWH than the non-HIV group (76.8% vs. 58.6%). Majority of PLWH were Black (49.3%). Forty-seven percent of PLWH were mechanically ventilated versus 33.3% of the non-HIV group. The most common comorbidity in both groups was hypertension (82.4% vs. 72.6%). When compared to HIV-negative patients, PLWH had a higher rate of kidney disease (72.1% vs. 53.6%, p=0.0086), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (41.2% vs. 14.5%, p=0.0001), liver disease (45.6% vs. 11.5%, p=0.0001) and current smoking (14.3% vs. 5.8%, p=0.0103). In PLWH, 70.6% of patients were on an integrase-based regimen. Fifty-three percent of PLWH had a CD4 count of > 200 cells/mm3 and 35.3% had an undetectable viral load (< 20 copies/mL). Unadjusted hospital mortality was 51.4% in PLWH and 36.2% in the non-HIV cohort (p=0.0089). The average length of hospital stay was 9.1 days vs. 8.4 days in PLWH versus the non-HIV group (p=0.4493). More patients were discharged to a nursing home in the non-HIV group vs. PLWH (37.8% vs. 14.3%, p=0.0001). Conclusion. Hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and HIV had a higher in-hospital mortality compared to those without HIV during the first COVID wave in New York City.

Understanding the components of U.S. food expenditures during recessionary and non-recessionary periods

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service's Food Expenditure Series, total spending on food and beverages in the United States reached $1.8 trillion in 2019. While real per capita total food expenditures steadily increased through the decades, the share of expenditures at food-at-home (FAH) establishments decreased from 1997 until 2019 and then increased abruptly in 2020. To better understand changes in food spending and its composition during 1997-2020, this study utilizes a structural decomposition analysis. The analysis compares: the roles of variations in aggregate income, propensity to spend versus to save, propensity to spend on food versus non-food, and substitution between FAH and food away from home (FAFH) during non-recessionary periods. These periods include the Great Recession (December 2007 to June 2009) and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Recession (February to April 2020).

Optimization of Object Detection CNN with Weight Quantization and Scale Factor Consolidation

Due to the current Covid-19 pandemic, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models attract attention in the applications to identify people with no masks. Developing an optimal CNN model is a challenging task especially for embedded deceives with limited hardware resources. To overcome the above challenge, we present a weight quantization technique aimed to produce compact CNN model for detection of people with mask or no mask. Its weights and feature maps are optimized using minimal fixed-point quantization at little or no sacrifice of its detection accuracy. The proposed weight quantization has been evaluated using a modified tiny-YOLOv2 model with the Mask and no-mask. Furthermore, we modified the internal model architecture to further reduce the model size and inference calculation by optimizing the order of max-pooling layers, consolidating the scale factors of batch normalization into only two pre-calculated parameters, and modifying the leaky ReLU activation function. The evaluation demonstrated that it saves more than 50 % of parameter memory and 56.21 % of inference computation. © 2021 IEEE.

Predicting factors of severe COVID-19 in patients with asthma: A Korean national cohort study

Background: There are limited data on factors predicting severe coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) in patients with asthma. Thus, we aimed to evaluate factors related to severe COVID-19. Method: The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) provided researchers with an anonymized national cohort of 5,628 patients with confirmed COVID-19, who had completed treatment or quarantine as of April 30, 2020. We evaluated factors associated with severe COVID-19, defined as cases requiring oxygen therapy, mechanical ventilation, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation treatment in addition to those who died after a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis. Results: Of the 5,628 patients confirmed with COVID-19, 128 (2.3%) had asthma. Among the 128 asthma patients, 32 (25%) had severe COVID-19 and 96 (75%) had non-severe COVID-19. Among asthmatic patients, those with severe COVID-19 were significantly older, had more dyspnea and fever, more comorbidities, and lower lymphocyte and platelet counts than those with non-severe COVID-19. In multivariable logistic regression analysis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 6.49, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.18- 41.81), low lymphocyte (aOR = 0.91, 95% CI = 0.86- 0.97), and low platelet (aOR = 0.99, 95% CI = 0.98- 0.99) counts were independently associated with severe COVID-19. Conclusion: In conclusion, among asthmatic patients, those with severe COVID-19 were significantly older, had more dyspnea and fever, more comorbidities including COPD, heart failure, and malignancies, and lower lymphocyte and platelet counts than those with non-severe COVID-19. Of these, COPD, low lymphocyte count, and low platelet count were independently associated with severe COVID-19.

Needs analysis in technical vocational education and training (TVET) programs for sustainable development of women in Cambodian hair and beauty industry

This study explores the status and needs of Cambodia Technical Vocational Education Training (TVET) for the hair and beauty Industry to develop Cambodia’s very first online TVET diploma curriculum for hair and beauty localize from the curriculums of the Korean online (cyber or digital) universities specialized in beauty area. The study conducted a comprehensive situational analysis by qualitative approach through focus group interviewing Government, Industry, TVET institution and descriptive survey to potential 176 students: 116 hair shop owners and 60 staff. The findings confirmed that stakeholders from government, industry, and TVET institutions expressed high need to introduce an innovative online hybrid model of TVET diploma program for the development of Cambodia hair and beauty industry as well as potential students from the industry. In conclusion, the study’s result suggests adopting a hybrid blended learning approach in TVET should be encouraged under the current Covid-19 pandemic. The study recommends further studies to evaluate its effectiveness and impact of this newly designed program with various perspective from the individual level, institutional level, and hair and beauty TVET sector in Cambodia. © 2021 UTHM Publisher. All rights reserved.

Analysis of COVID-19 genetic risk susceptibility using UK Biobank SNP genotype data

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic. Here, we performed a study on host susceptibility to COVID-19 infection using COVID-19 test results and genomic data released by UK Biobank until early October of 2020. The data consisted of 27,713 samples including 2740 positive cases. We employed genome-wide association study, gene-level association and pathway analyses using common and rare variants. Among these analyses, only pathway analysis based on rare variants found seven significant pathways. Among them, the JAK-STAT pathway and glycolipid biosynthesis pathway have been reported to be associated with a viral infection, especially COVID-19 infection. Further, we found new pathways that were not previously reported, including pathways related to cellular signalling like NLR signalling pathway. Additional experiments and studies of these pathways may unveil the pathophysiological of COVID-19 and identify highly susceptible groups. Copyright © 2021 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

A Soft Landing for Developing Countries and Non-Discrimination in Digital Trade: Possible Lessons from Asian Countries

The article suggests the implementation of certain legal devices to enable developing countries to achieve policy flexibility to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the expansion of digital trade while balancing some of the risks which this may present to consumers in the sphere of privacy as well as threats to governments in the form of national security. These include a 'renegotiation clause' as well as the familiar classification of 'special and differential treatment' for developing or least-developed countries.

PIN56 Content Analysis of FDA Warning Letters for Fraudulent COVID-19 Claims Using the Economic, Clinical, Humanistic Outcomes (ECHO) MODEL

Objectives: During the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous products have emerged with claims to prevent, treat, mitigate, or cure coronavirus. Some claims are often false or misleading. Using the economic, clinical, and humanistic outcomes (ECHO) model, this study aimed to review warning letters (WLs) issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to manufacturers selling products with fraudulent claims. Methods: A content-analysis approach was used to review WLs obtained from the FDA website. With seven WLs issued in March 2020, a data collection form (DCF) was developed using relevant literature and FDA guidance document on promotional materials from manufacturers. This DCF was then pilot tested on the other six WLs issued in March 2020. Using this DCF, two researchers reviewed WLs issued from April 2020 to December 2020. If there were disagreements between the two researchers, the third and fourth reviewers arbitrated on the disagreements;or the letters were reviewed together to determine a final classification. Results: A total of 141 WLs were analyzed. The products cited in the letters used online media (e.g., company website, Facebook, and Twitter) more commonly as promotional tools than print or broadcast. The products were predominantly drugs (79%), followed by medical device (11%) and food & beverages (6%). The average number of violations reported in each WL was 5.0 ± 3.4. Almost all products (93%) targeted consumers, three products (2%) targeted health providers, and three products (2%) targeted both consumers and health providers. Out of 151 fraudulent claims in 141 letters, 118 claims (78%) were related to clinical outcomes, 22 (15%) were humanistic, and 11 (7%) were related to economic outcomes. Conclusions: This study revealed COVID-19 related fraudulent and unproven claims included in the WLs issued by the FDA. Protecting consumers from products with such claims is crucial to promote consumer safety during COVID-19.