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The nucleic acid detection is an effective way for the prevention and control of COVID-19. PCR amplification is an important process in the nucleic acid detection. At present, PCR amplification has the problem of low heating/cooling rates, and poor temperature uniformity. This paper proposes a microchannel temperature control device for the nucleic acid detection. Five groups of parallel serpentine channels are used to increase the cooling rate of the PCR amplification. A gradual thermal conductivity design is applied to the reaction module to increase the temperature uniformity. The experimental results show that the best temperature uniformity is obtained when the materials of the inner and outer layers of the reaction module are copper and aluminum alloys, respectively. The limit and average heating/cooling rate are 7.2, 6.12, 5.52 and 5.28 °C/s, respectively, when the input power of the thermoelectric cooler is 11.07 W/cm2, the temperature and flow rate of the cooling water are 15℃ and 700 ml/min, and the thermal conductivity of the thermal grease is 6 W/(m·K). Compared with the commercial fan-fin cooling method, the limit and average heating/cooling rates are increased by 38.02%, 80.82%, 86.49% and 208.77%, respectively, with the help of microchannel cooling method. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd
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Medical History and Clinical Manifestation © Henan Science and Technology Press 2020.
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It has been generally reported that elderly individuals, especially those with underlying disease, are most vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection. After being infected with SARS-CoV-2, elderly patients, typically aged over 65, are more prone to severe symptoms and conditions, requiring care at the intensive care unit (ICU) [1, 2]. The elderly COVID-19 patients usually have poor outcomes with higher mortality than other age groups. A recent report from studying 339 elderly COVID-19 patients found that more than 70% of the enrolled patients were in severe or critical conditions, while 42.8% developed complication with bacterial infection. Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was reported in 21.0% of these patients. The mortality rate was 19.2% [3]. Another retrospective study on 113 deceased patients found that more than 83% of them were aged 60 or older [4]. This may be related to the weakened immune system and respiratory function of the elderly. Accordingly, the CT imaging manifestation of elderly patients appears severer and more progressive than that of young and middle-aged patients. The inflammation is mostly subpleural and often involving bilateral lungs, mainly presenting as ground-glass opacities (GGO) and consolidations in pulmonary CT. As the disease is rapidly progressive, diffuse bilateral lesions could develop in 4–7 days [5]. © Henan Science and Technology Press 2020.
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The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) is a growing resource of scientific papers on COVID-19 and related historical coronavirus research. CORD-19 is designed to facilitate the development of text mining and information retrieval systems over its rich collection of metadata and structured full text papers. Since its release, CORD-19 has been downloaded over 200K times and has served as the basis of many COVID-19 text mining and discovery systems. In this article, we describe the mechanics of dataset construction, highlighting challenges and key design decisions, provide an overview of how CORD-19 has been used, and describe several shared tasks built around the dataset. We hope this resource will continue to bring together the computing community, biomedical experts, and policy makers in the search for effective treatments and management policies for COVID-19. © ACL 2020.All right reserved.
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Low-income households generally experience a high energy burden;however, the factors influencing energy burdens are beyond socio-economics. This study explores the relationships between the multidimensionality of community vulnerability factors and energy burden across multiple geospatial levels in the United States. Our study found the distribution of energy burden in 2020 showed a great deal of variety, ranging from a minimum of 2.93 % to a maximum of 30.45 % across 3142 counties. The results of non-spatial and spatial regressions showed that the vulnerability ranks of socioeconomic, household composition and disability, minority and language, household type and transportation, and COVID mortality rate are significant predictors of energy burdens at the national level. However, at the regional level, only socioeconomic, minority and language significantly influence energy burdens. Minority and language negatively impact energy burdens except for the South East-Central region. Additionally, our analyses highlight the need to consider community vulnerability indicators' spatial homogeneity and heterogeneity. At the national level, only the epidemiological factors index is a spatially homogeneous predictor;on the regional and state level, the spatially homogeneous predictors such as socioeconomic status, household composition and disability, and household type and transportation vary by region. Such a region-sensitive relationship between energy burden and the predictors indicates spatial heterogeneity. This study suggests policy recommendations through the lens of the multidimensionality of community vulnerability factors. Implementing flexible national energy policies while making particular energy assistance policies for the vulnerable population at the regional or state levels is essential. © 2023
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The COVID-19 has changed people's lifestyle from many aspects such as the way people commute and their attention to health and fitness, and environmental problems. This report is to understand how residents in Shanghai commute with difficulties and the environmental sustainability challenges and health issues in the post-pandemic rehabilitation background. Taking educational institution in Shanghai as example, this study applied big data techniques with kernel density, Ripley's K(d) function and 2SFCA analysis to identify the spatial characteristics and accessibility of different institution types under different travel modes such as walking. The results show that the distribution is extremely uneven in Shanghai, area with extreme concentration is observed. In case of educational workplace, although the proportion of street-town with moderate or higher accessibility reached 74.34%, such proportion is only 41.01% for walking mode. Current planning has skewed commuting around educational sites towards more carbon-intensive travel patterns and not conducive for keeping fit and health. Besides, households located in the districts of Chongming, Qingpu and Jinshan commute much longer than those in other regions. Long commute time and less exercise may lead to the wider spread of disease and it's harmful to residents' health and sustainable living. In summary, the findings of this paper regarding commuting to educational sites provide a clearer understanding of the health and sustainability challenges for policymakers. Copyright © 2022 Shen.
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Aim To determine the antiviral and anti-inflammatory effects of the recommended prescription for COVID-2019-lung-spleen qi deficiency(4-1)against in vitro infection of SARS-CoV-2 and common coronaviruses.Methods The main chemical substances of 4-1 were analyzed by LC-MS.The toxicity and antiviral effects of of 4-1 were detected by MTT and by CPE assay, respectively.The viral loads in cell supernatant and the expression of inflammatory factors induced by viral infection were determined by qRT-PCR.Results The recommended prescription 4-1 contained 94 chemical compounds, including flavonoids, steroids, sesquiterpenoids, and so on.The range of selection indexes for SARS-CoV-2 and common coronaviruses was 8.44+/-0.49~52.26+/-2.3.This prescription could inhibit the proliferation of SARS-CoV-2, the expression of ACE2 and S mRNA, and down regulate IL-1alpha and CCL-5/RANTES at 10, 5, and 2.5 g*L-1 doses.Further, at doses of 20, 10 and 5 g*L-1, it could inhibit the proliferation of three common coronaviruses and suppress the overexpression of IL-6, CXCL-8/IL-8, CXCL-10/IP-10, TNF-alpha, IFN-alpha, CCL-2/MCP-1, MIG and CCL-5/RANTES induced by OC43/229E infection.The inhibitory effects were dose-dependent.Conclusions The prescription 4-1 has antiviral and anti-inflammation effects against multiple coronaviruses.This study provides the research basis for the treatment of common respiratory viral infections and emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19 by using traditional Chinese medicine. Copyright © 2022 Publication Centre of Anhui Medical University. All rights reserved.
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Purpose/Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the longstanding health disparities and unique health needs of adolescents from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds. With the rapid expansion of telehealth nationally, it is essential that health systems consider how telehealth could influence health equity and be leveraged to meet the needs of diverse populations. We launched a quality improvement (QI) initiative at a large safety-net hospital to assess adolescent and parent perspectives on the use of telehealth, specifically exploring barriers and facilitators to implementation, and then develop recommendations for adapting telehealth practices to optimize care and promote equity for diverse populations of adolescents. Design/Methods: From January-May 2021, we conducted surveys with adolescents ages 12-21 who had a telehealth visit at a county safety-net hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic (n=70) and their parents (n=41). We purposively sampled for adolescents from populations known to be underutilizing telehealth within our system;in our final sample, 39% were Latinx and 33% were Black, with 30% of Black adolescents identifying as Somali. The electronic surveys, which were delivered in English, Spanish or Somali, included questions about respondents': experiences and satisfaction with telehealth;barriers and facilitators to telehealth;experiences of racism and discrimination in healthcare;indicators of high-quality adolescent care and demographics. We analyzed data using descriptive statistics for quantitative variables, and content analysis for qualitative (open-ended) responses. We then hosted four listening sessions with adolescents (n=9) and parents (n=4) to collectively review findings and develop recommendations to optimize care for diverse adolescents and their families. Results: Participants were generally satisfied with telehealth and rated visits highly on quality of care (Figure 1). Commonly reported barriers to telehealth included: difficulty connecting to the visit, a lack of private space, feeling the provider may not be able to evaluate them fully during the visit, and not being able to get labs or imaging. Seven percent of adolescents and 15% of parents reported experiencing discrimination in healthcare, with over one-third (36%) of these experiences occurring during telehealth visits. Nearly half of adolescents (44%) expressed concern that something private from the visit might be shared with their parents, and 10% of adolescents did not have a private space to talk to their providers. Drawing on findings from surveys and listening sessions, we developed recommendations for clinicians and health systems (Table 1) and disseminated them across our hospital system. Conclusion/Discussion: Our QI initiative engaged a diverse population of adolescents and parents in developing recommendations for clinician- and systems-level changes for improving equity in the delivery and, ultimately, access to telehealth care. Our findings have implications, not only for our large safety-net county medical center, but also for other clinics serving racially and ethnically diverse young people. (Table Presented).
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During the COVID-19 outbreak, the risk of infection is not neglectable in a public transportation system. To satisfy the demands while controlling the spread of COVID-19, public transportation agencies have proposed various rules, such as increasing train frequency and requiring face coverings. In this chapter, we summarize newly developed evaluation methodologies, and evaluate the impacts of COVID-19 policies. We also present key findings regarding the impacts of different policies using these new methods. We find that the goal of stopping the pandemic coincided with minimizing the total delay when the service area was homogenous in infection rate. For heterogenous cities, minimizing the risk is equivalent to minimizing weighted travel time, where the weight is the infection rate. We also find that the results obtained from different models could be different due to their assumptions on the lost demand. If the demand is elastic, closing part of the system can prevent the spread of the pandemic, otherwise, closing will lead to longer waiting time, higher passenger density, and infection risk. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Information overload is a prevalent challenge in many high-value domains. A prominent case in point is the explosion of the biomedical literature on COVID-19, which swelled to hundreds of thousands of papers in a matter of months. In general, biomedical literature expands by two papers every minute, totalling over a million new papers every year. Search in the biomedical realm, and many other vertical domains is challenging due to the scarcity of direct supervision from click logs. Self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising direction to overcome the annotation bottleneck. We propose a general approach for vertical search based on domain-specific pretraining and present a case study for the biomedical domain. Despite being substantially simpler and not using any relevance labels for training or development, our method performs comparably or better than the best systems in the official TREC-COVID evaluation, a COVID-related biomedical search competition. Using distributed computing in modern cloud infrastructure, our system can scale to tens of millions of articles on PubMed and has been deployed as Microsoft Biomedical Search, a new search experience for biomedical literature: https://aka.ms/biomedsearch.
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Growth in China's economy is driven by the troika: consumption, investment and export. This paper examines the effect of uncertain events such as the global financial crisis in 2008, and the COVID-19 pandemic on the troika. Based on the construction of a new uncertainty index of China's economy, the relationship between uncertainty and growth in the troika is examined by using a TVP-VAR model. Results show that fluctuations in the uncertainty index during the COVID-19 epidemic had the greatest negative impact on consumption and investment at a magnitude of -0.27, notably greater than that during the period of the global financial crisis. The negative impact on export reached -0.73, smaller than that during the global financial crisis. Against a backdrop of the novel coronavirus epidemic, it is also found that expansionary monetary policies can have a relatively large impact on investment and export, reaching 1.75 and 1.57 respectively, while short-term impact on consumption is relatively weak, averaging at 0.51.
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In this paper, a BP neural network and an LSTM network are applied respectively to the prediction of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China and South Korea. The methods do not require specific theories of modelling and the predicted values can be obtained as long as the conventional parameters are set. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPS) of all the experiments are below 5% and the values of the determinable coefficient R-2 are all larger than 0.9. The experiments show that the models can fit the actual values well and make relatively accurate predictions. As of March 29, 2020, the cumulative number of confirmed cases in Wuhan is expected to reach 50,068 using BP neural networks and 49,972 using LSTM network, respectively. As of April 13, 2020, the cumulative number of confirmed cases in South Korea is expected to reach 8,862 using BP neural networks and 8,716 using LSTM network, respectively. The models of neural networks are effective in predicting the trend of the COVID-19 epidemic, which is meaningful to prevent and control the epidemic. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.
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The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic not only has created a health crisis across the world but is also expected to impact negatively the global economy and societies at a scale that is maybe larger than that of the 2008 financial crisis. Simultaneously, it has inevitably exerted many negative consequences on the geoenvironment on which human beings depend. The current paper articulates the role of environmental geotechnics in elucidating and mitigating the effects of the current pandemic. It is the belief of all authors that the Covid-19 pandemic presents not only significant challenges but also opportunities for the development of the environmental geotechnics field. This discipline should make full use of geoenvironmental researchers' and engineers' professional skills and expertise to look for development opportunities from this crisis, to highlight the irreplaceable position of the discipline in the global fight against pandemics and to contribute to the health and prosperity of communities, to serve humankind better. In order to reach this goal while taking into account the specificity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the uncertainty of its environmental effects, it is believed that more emphasis should be placed on the following research directions: pathogen-soil interactions;isolation and remediation technologies for pathogen-contaminated sites;new materials for pathogen-contaminated soil;recycling and safe disposal of medical wastes;quantification of uncertainty in geoenvironmental and epidemiological problems;emerging technologies and adaptation strategies in civil, geotechnical and geoenvironmental infrastructures;pandemic-induced environmental risk management;and modelling of pathogen transport and fate in geoenvironment, among others. Moreover, Covid-19 has made it clear to the environmental geotechnics community the importance of urgent international co-operation and of multidisciplinary research actions that must extend to a broad range of scientific fields, including medical and public health disciplines, in order to meet the complexities posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. © 2021 ICE Publishing: All rights reserved.
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The COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 has aroused wide public concern. Both 2019-nCoV and SARS-CoV belong to the coronaviridae family, and invade target cells through ACE2.So an in-depth understanding of ACE2 and a series of pathophysiological changes caused by the virus invading the human body may help to discover and explain the corresponding clinical manifestations and then deal with them timely. In addition, ACE2 is a potential therapeutic target, according to this, we can find the corresponding treatment strategy. This article explains the role of ACE2 in multiple organ damage caused by 2019-nCoV and SARS-CoV, and blockers targeting ACE2, and inflammation inhibitors, with a view to providing a basis for subsequent related research, diagnosis and treatment, and drug development. Copyright © 2020 by the Chinese General Practice.
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The cause and treatment of refractory hyperglycemia in a critically ill coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patient during treatment were analyzed retrospectively, indicating that novel coronavirus infection may cause damage to glucose metabolism, so the monitoring and control of blood glucose should be strengthened in clinical treatment. Copyright © 2020 by the Chinese Medical Association.