ABSTRACT
COVID-19 pandemic lock-downs have led to the biggest fall in energy demand in over 70 years while also having an immense effect on the current energy mix. This study overviews the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the UK energy demand by analysing the associated electricity generation mix before and during COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis uses open-access data that is publicly available on the Official Carbon Intensity API for Great Britain. The scope of this paper is two-fold: first, to provide an overview of the lock-down measures in electricity demand and generation across the world, and second to identify the impact of lock-down restrictions on the British energy generation mix. It can be seen from the results that electricity generation by fossil fuels and renewable energy sources has shown opposite trends while the share of the later increased significantly during the lockdown period.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 pandemic lock-downs have led to the biggest fall in energy demand in over 70 years while also having an immense effect on the current energy mix. This study overviews the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the UK energy demand by analysing the associated electricity generation mix before and during COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis uses open-access data that is publicly available on the Official Carbon Intensity API for Great Britain. The scope of this paper is two-fold: first, to provide an overview of the lock-down measures in electricity demand and generation across the world, and second to identify the impact of lock-down restrictions on the British energy generation mix. It can be seen from the results that electricity generation by fossil fuels and renewable energy sources has shown opposite trends while the share of the later increased significantly during the lockdown period. © 2022 EUROSIS-ETI.
ABSTRACT
Background and Objective: It is necessary to have a suitable tool for measuring the tendency to use the Covid-19 vaccine. The aim of this study was to determine the validity and reliability of the tendency to use Covid-19 vaccine questionnaire among health care workers of a hospital in Tehran, Iran. Materials and Methods: This is an instrumentation type of methodological. Fifty-six questions were considered as the items of the questionnaire. For testing the validity, the face validity and content validity were used in correspondence with 10 experts’ opinions. Reliability check was performed through the Cronbach’s alpha and test-retest. Finally, the structural validity was evaluated with 474 subjects. Results: The results showed that the scales of the tendency to use Covid-19 vaccine questionnaire have an appropriate face validity for all items with an impact score higher than 1.5 and an appropriate content validity ratio in the range of 0.70 and a sufficient content validity index in the range of 0.73 to 087. Also, it had an acceptable internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha) in the range of 0.87 to 0.96. Also, the reliability of the test-retest ranged from 0.68 to 0.92. For the structural validity, 8 factors were selected with a factor value higher than 0.4. Also, in the confirmatory section of the factors an acceptable goodness of fit index (GFI) (Range from 0.91 to 0.98) and the root mean square error in the range of 0.33 to 0.49 was achieved. In total, four questions were removed in the content validity ratio review stage and one question was removed in the content validity index review stage. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that the tendency to use Covid-19 vaccine questionnaire has sufficient validity and reliability and is a suitable tool for evaluating the health staff’s tendency towards vaccination. Ultimately, this questionnaire was approved with 8 factors (perceived sensitivity, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, cues to action, self-efficacy, knowledge and behavior) and 51 questions. © 2022 Iranian Association of Health Education and Health Promotion. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases. © 2021 Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI). All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 is an emerging pandemic that caused a very widespread infection with more than 1000000 cases in Iran within a year. The main cause of mortality among patients with COVID-19 is pulmonary failure. In Iranian Traditional Medicine, essences have been used for curing pulmonary diseases. Pinen-Hydronoplacton-Ribonucleic acid (PHR) is an inhaler spray made of seven different plants, which all are used by humans and have desirable pharmacological features for treating pulmonary symptoms of COVID-19 patients. This study was conducted to assess the safety and effectiveness of PHR160 spray in improving pulmonary symptoms of COVID-19 patients. This was a single-centre, non-blinded randomized clinical trial with two parallel groups in two different wards of Baqiyatallah hospital, Tehran, Iran. Participants were 63 male patients diagnosed with COVID-19 pneumonia, divided into 2 groups of 32 in the intervention group and 31 in the control group. The intervention group received 5 days of PHR160 spray, 10 puffs each day, 300 micrograms in each puff in addition to the routine treatment. Oxygen saturation was measured by a pulse oximeter, every six hours and recorded daily. This study showed that administration of PhR 160 in patients of COVID-19 was safe, and it significantly increased the arterial oxygen saturation percentage in COVID-19 patients. In addition, it decreased hospitalization duration, dyspnea score, and cough score significantly in the patients. The statistical modelling test, with adjusting the age and respiratory rate for baseline and 4 days of the intervention, shows that the oxygen saturation percentage mean was significantly more in the intervention group by 5.14 units (p<0.001). © 2022, National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The current study sought to identify factors that may affect health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients recovering from COVID-19 infection in Iran. In a cross-sectional study 258 patients diagnosed with COVID-19, participants completed a questionnaire approximately one month after hospital discharge when demographic and clinical factors (including insomnia) and HRQoL were assessed. A logistic regression was used. Age, gender, marital status, education, having child, early physician visit, early diagnosis, early hospitalization, symptom type, Rhesus factor, and level of insomnia were associated with various components of HRQoL (p<0.05). In multivariate analyses, poorer physical HRQoL was independently associated with female gender (OR=4.53;95% CI=2.22-2.29), initial symptom of cough (OR=2.73;95% CI=1.26-5.94), and insomnia (OR=2.74;95% CI=1.22-6.14). Poorer mental HRQoL was associated with being age 40 years or older (OR=1.90;95% CI=1.02-3.54), female gender (OR=2.48;95% CI=1.26-4.88), initial symptom being cough (OR=3.12;95% CI=1.46-6.68), and insomnia (sub-threshold insomnia, OR=3.19;95% CI, 1.51-6.74, to severe insomnia, OR=3.86;95% CI=1.35-11.07). Healthcare professionals should be aware that older people, female gender, those with initial symptom of cough, and insomnia may be at greater risk for poor quality of life following hospital discharge. © 2022, Intelektual Pustaka Media Utama. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Background and Objective: Improving the health literacy in the different populations regarding COVID-19 may be useful in the control of its prevalence. This study examined the psychometric properties of a newly developed disease-specific measure of health literacy related to COVID-19 to be used as a standard measure. Materials and Methods: Relevant literature was reviewed to identify an item pool, and an expert panel was convened to choose items that might be included in the scale. Content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI) was determined and face validity was examined by calculating the impact score in a group of social media users. The factor structure of the initial scale was examined in 590 Iranian individuals participating in online social networks in September 2020. Internal consistency of the scale was assessed by Cronbach’s alpha and test-retest reliability of responses was measured by Pearson correlation coefficients. Results: A five-factor solution for the 51-items scale was obtained through exploratory factor analysis. The five main dimensions were understanding, communication, information seeking, analysis, and behavior. The dimensions explained 47% of the variance in scale scores. Participants whose scores fell in the high category (27%) were significantly different compared to those whose scores fell in the low category (27%) on all dimensions (p<0.001). The CVR values for all items were greater than 0.85 and all items also got CVI values higher than 0.79 based on nine-person expert panel. The Cronbach’s alpha for the overall scale was 0.89, and it was ranged from 0.71 to 0.90. Test-retest reliability for the scale was high (r=0.89). Conclusion: Health Literacy Scale for protect against COVID-19is a valid and reliable measure for Iranian population. This measure should be translated, and administered, in other settings to replicate the results obtained here. © 2022, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: The disease related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has now been a pandemic throughout the world. Although the epidemiological studies and clinical trials are utilized to find standard measures and medicines to prevent and control COVID-19, addressing the mental health and psychology of the people who may be at risk of the disease may also be effective to find comprehensive methods to better overcome this pandemic. This study aimed at investigating the mental status of both the general population and healthcare personnel during this pandemic in Iran.
ABSTRACT
Background and Aim: COVID-19 as a pandemic disease caused many deaths across the world and imposed considerable pressure on health care systems as well as healthcare providers. This study was conducted to clarify the elements and dimensions of experiences among nurses when caring for COVID-19 patients. Methods: This qualitative study was performed using the content analysis method in 16 nursing staffs that were responsible for caring for patients with COVID-19 selected by purposive sampling in April 2020. Deep semi-structured interviews in experimentation format was used to collect data. All interviews were recorded and typed in the MAXQDA software and then analyzed by eight steps including writing interviews, determining the semantic units, text coding, matching codes with text, categorizing and developing categories, reviewing the categories, identifying the subthemes and reporting the findings. Results: Overall, 223 codes were extracted from the interviews and after the integration of similarities three key themes including personal protection, structural protection and safety problems were obtained indicating participants' experiences on self-protection when. Conclusion: Themes such as personal protection, structural protection and safety problems are the most important concerns raised when nurses caring for COVID-19 patients and should be considered when planning to protect nursing health. © 2020 Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.