Barriers to achieving sustainability in pharmaceutical supply chains in the post-COVID-19 era

Purpose - The recent pandemic caused by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has significantly impacted the operational performances of pharmaceutical supply chains (SCs), especially in emerging economies that are critically vulnerable due to their inadequate resources. Finding the possible barriers that continue to impede the sustainable performance of SCs in the post-COVID-19 era has become essential. This study aims to investigate and analyze the barriers to achieving sustainability in the pharmaceutical SC of an emerging economy in a bid to help decision-makers recognize the most influential barriers. Design/methodology/approach - To achieve the goals, two decision-making tools are integrated to analyze the most critical barriers: interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and the matrix of cross-impact multiplications applied to classification (MICMAC). In contrast to other multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches, ISM develops a hierarchical decision tool for decision-makers and cluster analysis of the barriers using the MICMAC method based on their driving and dependency powers. Findings - The findings reveal that the major barriers are in a four-level hierarchical relationship where "Insufficient SC strategic plans to ensure agility during crisis" acts as the most critical barrier, followed by "Poor information structure among SC contributors," and "Inadequate risk management policy under pandemic." Finally, the MICMAC analysis validates the findings from the ISM approach. Originality/value - This study provides meaningful insights into barriers to achieving sustainability in pharmaceutical SCs in the post-COVID-19 era. The study can help pharmaceutical SC practitioners to better understand what can go wrong in post-COVID-19, and develop actionable strategies to ensure sustainability and resilience in practitioners' SCs.

INITIAL STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON BUSINESS SURVIVAL AMONG SINGLE MOTHER ENTREPRENEURS: DOES DIGITAL MARKETING MATTER?

Since 2019, the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has hit the whole world significantly and has been one of the worst nightmares for us. Single mother entrepreneurs have been one of the most affected groups due to COVID-19, and this group's gradual implementation of technology is called for. This article aims to determine the pandemic's implications for SMPs and whether they have taken any new strategies or changes for the survival of their business. Adopting a qualitative research approach, an open group discussion has been conducted at Padang Jawa, Klang. A total of seven SMPs have been interviewed. The COVID-19 Movement Control Order (MCO) impacts on single mother entrepreneurs and strategies have been divided into two sections: the entrepreneur's perspective on COVID-19 and their current view and approach to facing the pandemic. © School of Engineering, Taylor's University.

CovidSense: A Heterogeneous Robot System for Indoor Area for COVID-19 Mitigation using Deep Learning Techniques

The countermeasure for preventing COVID-19 should be further studied in order to make sure countries are prepared for the endemic phase. The biggest challenge of COVID-19 is its high infection rate and infection mortality rate. Robots offer a very good solution to this, hence, we developed a robot that can autonomously navigate a closed indoor room, sanitize it, and monitor social proximity practices. The quality of the hardware design, electronic system and software developments are conducted and experimental works to test the performance of the robot are performed. © 2022 IEEE.

Fruit production in Bangladesh- a unique contribution to nutritional food security, household income, poverty reduction, women participation, biodiversity, sustainable development, environmental protection and immunity enhancement to manage COVID-19

Bangladesh is an agrarian country with almost 80% of the population living in rural areas and depending on agriculture. With the increase in population and decrease in cultivable land, there is an increasing demand in nutritionally rich high value fruit crops. Although Bangladesh is self-sufficient in grains, there are still about 40 million people suffering from malnutrition i.e. deficient in vitamins and minerals (hidden hunger). The fruit production scenario of Bangladesh in 2016-2017 was 83.31 lakh tons production in an area of 7.20 lakh hectares (8.57% of total land), while demand was about 129.48 lakh tons (HW, DAE, BBS 2017) resulting in a deficit of 46.17 lakh tons. Bangladesh produces 64% of the total demand for fruits. The rest of the 36% fruits are imported using huge foreign currency. Nevertheless, the fruit production scenario is rapidly changing with fruit growers coming forward in this sector to improve production of the most common fruits such as mango, jackfruit, litchi, blackberry, pineapple, banana, palm fruit, coconut, guava, Burmese grape, and watermelon. After meeting local demands, Bangladesh is now exporting some of its most popular fruits, mostly to countries that have large numbers of Bangladeshi expatriates. Some fruits are in a better position for export, attributed to their quality and production. Bangladesh is the seventh largest mango producer, and third producer for guava in the world. Sustainable Agro technology, GAP and GPHP applied in fruits crops are now improving nutrition intake, household food security and household income. Moreover, fruit production also creates employment, reduces poverty, and protects the environment. About 20% women, especially in the rural areas are involved in fruit production. Incorporating modern fruit production technology in the 24 million homesteads enriches nutrition intake, provides all year and sustainable income. It has been reported that income from fruit production was five to six fold more than income from agronomical crops. Fruit crops also act as windbreak in rural villages/houses, and as shelter belt in coastal areas of Bangladesh. Evergreen horticultural plants sink abundance of CO2 and releases significant amounts of oxygen, consequently resulting in cleaner air and environment.

Development of Low-Cost Thermal Scanner and Mask Detection for Covid-19

COVID-19 disease spreads rapidly from person to person through airborne transmission. The preventive measures are very important to prevent and control the rapid spread of COVID-19. The effective protection technique is by wearing a face mask in public space. Therefore, this study proposed a face mask detection through Haar Cascade approaches. Besides, body thermal screening features has also been considered in this study to determine whether an individual is healthy or not by using thermal sensor. The pilot study was run for a week in other to test the capabilities and the durability of the program to run in the community. The results from the pilot study showed that the thermal scanner is able to run standalone in the public for a week. In overall, the thermal Scanner device was successfully developed with a combinations of deep learning technique to detect a person with facemask and able to screen a body temperature just by using low-cost components.

COVID-19 Vaccine Induced Pericarditis

Acute pericarditis is an inflammation of the pericardium accompanied by chest pain, pericardial effusion, and electrocardiographic (ECG) changes. It is mainly caused by viruses, followed by bacterial and other infections, tumors, underlying diseases, trauma, medications, and environmental factors. Several reports have emerged on pericarditis as a potential side effect associated primarily with mRNA vaccines, particularly in male adolescents after the second dose. However, the exact mechanism of COVID-19 vaccine-induced pericarditis remains elusive. The most common clinical presentation seen in patients is the elevation in troponin level, as well as C-reactive protein. To exclude other etiologies causing pericarditis, a meticulous diagnostic workup is performed. Thus, a detailed history and physical examination and the timing and type of the vaccine are important. Owning to the novel etiology of pericarditis caused by the COVID-19 vaccine, treatment is based on the patient's symptoms and diagnostic workup, including pain management and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents with or without colchicine. However, dual therapy with intravenous immune globulins and/or corticosteroids may be beneficial in severe cases. This chapter will emphasize the emerging adverse events of vaccineinduced pericarditis, summarizing its epidemiology, pathogenesis, clinical presentation, diagnosis, management, and limitation. © 2022 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

The Implication, Current View and Approach in Facing Covid-19 Pandemic among Resort Entrepreneurs in Pangkor: A pilot study

The business resort owner is one of the groups hugely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. This article aims to determine the pandemic's implications for business resort owners and whether they have taken any new strategies or changes for the survival of their business. A total of seven business resort owners in Pulau Pangkor have been interviewed via focus group discussion as a pilot study. The paper also aims to discover their current view and approach to facing the pandemic to ensure their survival in business.

Company Strategies on Social Well-being during COVID-19 Pandemic: A systematic literature review

The most recent crisis that has put businesses and people under threat is the emergence of Covid-19. The purpose of the study is to review articles on the company strategies for social well-being to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. This article is a review paper via the systematic literature review (SLR) method. The PRISMA is a review protocol that will be used as a basis to retrieve main themes and sub-themes. The contribution of this review should be in offering gaps in what should be ready and prepared next by the company if facing any crisis or pandemic.

An Efficient Deep Learning Framework for Face Mask Detection in Complex Scenes

COVID-19 has caused a global health crisis that has infected millions of people across the globe. Currently, the fourth wave of COVID-19 is about to be declared as Omicron. The new variant of COVID-19 has caused an unprecedented increase in cases. According to World Health Organization, safety measures must be adopted in public places to prevent the spread of the virus. One effective safety measure is to wear face masks in crowded places. To create a safe environment, government agencies adopt strict rules to ensure adherence to safety measures. However, it is difficult to manually analyze the crowded scenes and identify people violating the safety measures. This paper proposed an automated approach based on a deep learning framework that automatically analyses the complex scenes and identifies people with face masks or without facemasks. The proposed framework consists of two sequential parts. In the first part, we generate scale aware proposal to cover scale variations, and in the second part, the framework classifies each proposal. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework on a challenging benchmark data set. We demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves high performance and outperforms other reference methods by a considerable margin from experimental results. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

A Systematic Review on Company Strategies to Cope with Covid-19 Crisis

In the competitive world of business, companies need to always be prepared in facing external threats that could put their sustainability in danger. The most recent crisis that had put businesses in a threat is the emergence of Covid-19 pandemic on December 2019. The purpose of the systematic review is to analyse the measures or strategies adopted by companies in order to cope with Covid-19 crisis. Based on the review conducted, several recommendations are highlighted to ensure in the future, company are more ready to face any crises beforehand.

How Australians Are Coping with the Longest Restrictions: An Exploratory Analysis of Emotion and Sentiment from Tweets

Australia is one of the nations having the most extended international border closure and lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This provides a unique opportunity to explore and understand the emotion and sentiment in the tweets posted by Australians. To utilise this opportunity, tweets from Twitter were collected since the beginning of the pandemic till the 30th of October 2021. Search queries were generated to get COVID-19 and lockdown-related tweets that returned any tweets with the relevant tags. After collecting the tweets, several text pre-processing techniques were applied. Later, sentiment analysis and emotion detection were performed on the pre-processed tweets. Lastly, results were aggregated together and the findings were discussed. Findings from this study suggested that sentiments and emotions fluctuated depending on time and region. The understanding of people’s sentiment and emotion towards lockdown presented in this paper may help the policymakers in decision making in future especially with the new variant (Omicron) of COVID-19. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Digitalization of Business for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)

Digitalization is critical for the long-term viability of small businesses in the new economy. As global digitalization accelerates, Malaysian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME) must embrace the digital economy to contribute to economic growth. A critical issue confronting SMEs in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic is adopting a digital business model. This study examines the importance of embedding digital technology into business models among SMEs, which has been shown to increase long-term productivity and sustainability. Technology adoption will help close the productivity gap between SMEs and large corporations by increasing capacity and capability for greater competitiveness and innovation.

Challenges and Lessons Learnt on Waste Management and Disposal from Mauritania Deepwater Abandonment and Decommissioning Campaign

Abandonment and decommissioning activities of oil and gas assets had been on the increasing trend. As an activity of minimal to no economic value return, the investment into Abandonment and Decommissioning (A&D) should be properly strategized to ensure all objectives are met safely within available time and resources. This paper will discuss Operator's strategy in planning and handling waste from A&D activities of fifteen (15) deepwater subsea wells in Mauritania, West Africa. The approach of this A&D project at a remote location was done in two separate campaign instead of a single campaign based on technical and commercial evaluations performed by Operator. Subsea structures, Christmas trees, tubulars and others are expected to be retrieved and disposed according to local and international standard. In general, Operator are expecting two (2) type of waste which are nonhazardous waste and hazardous waste due to hydrocarbon or naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) contamination. Due to the limitation of capable hazardous waste handling and disposal in country, Operator decided to export waste to identified facilities outside of country at the end of the project via sea-freight. Operator appointed one contractor to provide a full-service related to the waste management and disposal that covers field services and onshore services that includes radiological monitoring to identify NORM waste, labelling, packaging at offshore, onshore storage, transportation and logistics that include Trans-Frontier Shipment (TFS). The strategy of appointing one contractor for full service of waste management and disposal has promoted a single - point accountability to the contractor and this has enabled the objective been delivered effectively. COVID-19 pandemic posed a great challenge on cross-border logistic planning due to additional measure been imposed by receiving country. Furthermore, the new development of United Kingdom exiting European Union (BREXIT) also posed some level of uncertainty to the contractor to obtain relevant approvals for waste export. To reduce the amount of waste to be export, Operator continuously looking for and successfully found a local recycling facility that able to handle the non-hazardous waste while meeting local regulation, Operator's and industrial standard. All outlined strategy was proven to be effective for waste management in remote location, uncertainty on cross-border waste export challenge, as well as capitalizing on the limited local resources available. Copyright © 2021, Society of Petroleum Engineers

Prevalence, Clinical Course and Etiology of Viral Myocarditis in the COVID-19 Era

Background: Myocarditis is one of the most suspected etiologies in patients with unexplained heart failure (HF). We studied the in-hospital prevalence of viral myocarditis and recognize the etiologic cardiotropic viruses in patients admitted with unexplained HF during the COVID era. Method: This is a prospective observational study. We recruited patients with unexplained HF presenting at a university hospital from 1st October 2020 till 31st March 2021 (Fig.1). Patients were included if they present with unexplained acute HF associated with normal coronary angiography (CA). All patients were subjected to full history and examination, ECG, echocardiography, cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) and CA. Sera were obtained from all suspected patients for detection of antibodies against the viruses by using ELISA and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Results: Fifty-one patients fulfilled the inclusion criteria. 72.5% were males with mean age 39±16 years. We classified patients into 2 categories based on CMR results: Group A (CMR positive myocarditis) 12 patient (23.5%) and group B (CMR negative myocarditis) 35 (68.6%) patients. 51% of the patients presented with dyspnea, 27.5% with chest pain, 33.3% had LVEF >50%,19.6% with cardiogenic shock. 65.9% of patients (n=31/47) were associated with antibodies against the common cardiotropic viruses. Parvovirus B19 22 (46.8%) and Coxackie 16 (34%) were observed. 3 patients died at 6 months clinical follow up;91.5% from patients had recovered left ventricular ejection fraction. Conclusion: The in-hospital prevalence of myocarditis was 5 times higher in the COVID era. CMR is a good positive test for the diagnose acute myocarditis. Parvovirus B19 and Coxackie viruses represent most common pathogens in our locality. (Clinical trial registration no=NCT04312490, STDF grant no=26393 ) [Formula presented]

Exploring Barriers to Mitigate Disruptions in Sustainable Supply Chain of Pharmaceutical Industry During COVID19

The pandemic, COVID 19, has affected global economy severely which caused an outbreak of crisis in all sectors of business. Firms are struggling to keep up with the normal functions in different stages of supply chain which brought sustainability under a big risk. Concerned by the COVID-19 outbreak, the main aim of this paper is to determine the threatening barriers to supply chain sustainability in the pharmaceutical industry of the South Asian region. This industry is one of the most pivotal and developing sectors in the south Asian region with respect to other industries in this region. Although economic growth is noticeable in this sector, many questions are arising about its sustainability and resilience in a true sense amidst the global pandemic. To establish the sustainability of this sector under a pandemic scenario, the major barriers in terms of social, economic, and environmental perspectives have been identified and analysed in this research. Twenty crucial constraints have been identified and classified in five categories through an extensive study of literature and opinion of industry expert. This paper uses, Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) approach to develop the hierarchical structure and connection between these obstacles. ISM presents the interdependency of the driving and driven power of these barriers. Another modernistic approach, Matrix of Cross-Impact Multiplications Applied to Classification (MICMAC), has been used to recognize the barriers as driving factors, dependent variables, and link variables using. The modelling of this study provides companies insight into obstacles and the efficient and effective management of their resources while making their supply chains sustainable. The study closes by discussing findings and future area of the research. © IEOM Society International.

SARS-CoV-2 at the human-animal interphase: A review.

Since its emergence in China in December 2019, COVID-19 remains the recent leading disease of concern drawing the public health attention globally. The disease is known of viral origin and zoonotic nature originating from animals. However, to date neither the source of the spillover nor the intermediate hosts are identified. Moreover, the public health situation is intermittently aggravated by identification of new animals susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 infection, potentially replicating the virus and maintaining intra and interspecies spread of the disease. Although the role of a given animal and/or its produce is important to map the disease pattern, continuous efforts should be undertaken to further understand the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2, a vital step to establish effective disease prevention and control strategy. This manuscript attempted to review updates regarding SARS-CoV-2 infection at the human-animal interface with consideration to postulations on the genetic relatedness and origin of the different SARS-CoV-2 variants isolated from different animal species. Also, the review addresses the possible role of different animal species and their produce in transmission of the disease. Also, the manuscript discussed the contamination potentiality of the virus and its environmental stability. Finally, we reviewed the currently instituted measures to prevent and manage the spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The manuscript suggested the One Health based control measures that could prove of value for the near future.