Unnatural Death Among Covid-19 Tested Positive Individuals: A Retrospective Study

Introducction:-Covid 19 started out as a fast-spreading viral disease, in Wuhan in 2019. Soon, it spread across the globe and WHO declared it a Pandemic. Various countries took various measures to control its spread and transmission. By the time, countries recovered from it, a new wave would come along with different expressions and pathophysiology. When Covid 19 began, various health agencies in India started making protocols and standard ooperating procedures including conducting autopsies in COVID-19 infected bodies. Aims and Objectives:-Aim of our study is to analyze cause of death among all covid 19 positive cases brought for medicolegal autopsies from the time of lockdown for a period of one year. Our aim is to see if there were any factors which could have prevented these deaths. Material(s) and Method(s): A retrospective study of 1 year conducted from 25th March 2020 to 24th March 2021, (1st wave of Covid 19) was done in a tertiary care hospital in Bangalore. (Bowring and Lady Curzon hospital) Results: 39 Covid-19-positive unnatural deaths were handled with the youngest being 18 years old and the oldest beings 83. The majority turned out to be suicides (51.28%), then RTAs, falls, and natural death. The commonest method of suicide was hanging (35.89%), followed by poison consumption, and falling from a height. Conclusion(s): COVID-19 is a viral infection with variable clinical signs and variable fatality rates. There is much to learn about it. However, suicides in COVID-19 cases might not have ended death if some care, timely diagnosis, and treatment were provided.Copyright © 2023, Institute of Medico-legal Publication. All rights reserved.

Lemierre's Syndrome in the External Jugular Vein Precipitated by COVID-19 Infection.

Lemierre's syndrome is a condition when an oropharyngeal infection, typically from Fusobacterium necrophorum, causes thrombophlebitis of the internal jugular vein. There have been few case reports of Lemierre's syndrome affecting the external jugular vein, but to our knowledge, this is the first case report where COVID-19 infection is the prime suspect for causing this syndrome. SARS-CoV-2 infection, known to cause hypercoagulability and immunosuppression, increases the risk of deep venous thrombosis and secondary infections. We report a case of a young male with no known risk factors who developed Lemierre's syndrome as a complication of COVID infection.

Cross-sensor periocular biometrics in a global pandemic: Comparative benchmark and novel multialgorithmic approach

The massive availability of cameras and personal devices results in a wide variability between imaging conditions, producing large intra-class variations and a significant performance drop if images from heterogeneous environments are compared for person recognition purposes. However, as biometric solutions are extensively deployed, it will be common to replace acquisition hardware as it is damaged or newer designs appear or to exchange information between agencies or applications operating in different environments. Furthermore, variations in imaging spectral bands can also occur. For example, face images are typically acquired in the visible (VIS) spectrum, while iris images are usually captured in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum. However, cross-spectrum comparison may be needed if, for example, a face image obtained from a surveillance camera needs to be compared against a legacy database of iris imagery. Here, we propose a multialgorithmic approach to cope with periocular images captured with different sensors. With face masks in the front line to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, periocular recognition is regaining popularity since it is the only region of the face that remains visible. As a solution to the mentioned cross-sensor issues, we integrate different biometric comparators using a score fusion scheme based on linear logistic regression This approach is trained to improve the discriminating ability and, at the same time, to encourage that fused scores are represented by log-likelihood ratios. This allows easy interpretation of output scores and the use of Bayes thresholds for optimal decision-making since scores from different comparators are in the same probabilistic range. We evaluate our approach in the context of the 1st Cross-Spectral Iris/Periocular Competition, whose aim was to compare person recognition approaches when periocular data from visible and near-infrared images is matched. The proposed fusion approach achieves reductions in the error rates of up to 30%–40% in cross-spectral NIR-VIS comparisons with respect to the best individual system, leading to an EER of 0.2% and a FRR of just 0.47% at FAR = 0.01%. It also represents the best overall approach of the mentioned competition. Experiments are also reported with a database of VIS images from two different smartphones as well, achieving even bigger relative improvements and similar performance numbers. We also discuss the proposed approach from the point of view of template size and computation times, with the most computationally heavy comparator playing an important role in the results. Lastly, the proposed method is shown to outperform other popular fusion approaches in multibiometrics, such as the average of scores, Support Vector Machines, or Random Forest.

Rapidly developing large pneumatocele and spontaneous pneumothorax in SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread to more than 70 countries around the world since its discovery in 2019. More than 2.5 million cases and more than 130,000 deaths have been reported in the United States alone. The common radiological presentation in this disease is noted to be the presence of ground glass opacities and/or consolidations. We report a case of 40-year-old male admitted for COVID-19 and rapidly deteriorated into severe acute respiratory distress syndrome requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation with no prior history of smoking or lung disease. The patient had normal imaging 3 days prior to admission to the hospital and rapidly developed a large pneumatocele with pneumothorax requiring chest tube placement that later on resolved. This is a unique radiologic finding in COVID-19 and likely related to severe inflammation secondary to SARS-CoV-2 infection.