Priming COVID-19's consequences can increase support for investments in public health.

Can messaging that emphasizes the costs of COVID-19 increase popular support for more proactive public health policies? People who experience disasters often become more supportive of policies to address their underlying causes, and the pandemic may have similar spillover effects for public opinion. To test this idea, the study implements a survey experiment in Italy, Germany, and the United States in which half of the respondents were randomly assigned to a prime about the impact of the pandemic prior to answering questions about their support for public health policies. The results show that respondents who received the prime became more favorable toward increased government spending on domestic and foreign public health programs alike. These treatment effects were consistent across countries, across two different surveys in the United States conducted at different points in time, and across partisan subgroups. However, the treatment did not consistently increase support for more active and intrusive government policies to address specific public health challenges like smoking or HIV/AIDS. The results suggest that public health advocates may benefit from messaging that connects COVID-19 to the need for public health funding beyond the context of the pandemic.

Facial Nerve Palsy as Complication in COVID-19 Associated Mucormycosis: A Case Series.

Mucormycosis is an opportunistic fungal infection indicating a high mortality rate. Among six varieties of involved sites, rhino cerebral mucormycosis (RCM) is not the most uncommon. During the COVID-19 pandemic, with the increase, in predisposing conditions incidence rate of mucormycosis progressed. For aggressive treatment, an early diagnosis can be armored to reduce morbidity and mortality. Clinically RCM poses non-specific symptoms and signs delaying diagnosis. This is associated with orbital cellulitis and sinusitis, one-sided headache behind the eye, diplopia, blurring of visions, nasal congestion, rhinorrhea, epistaxis, nasal hypoesthesia, facial pain and numbness, and a history of black nasal discharge. Not commonly the complications of cranial nerve involvement have been reported. In the present case series, three presentations of facial nerve palsy in COVID-19 associated with mucormycosis are added to the literature database.

Democracy, Capacity, and Coercion in Pandemic Response: COVID-19 in Comparative Political Perspective.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged governments around the world. It also has challenged conventional wisdom and empirical understandings in the comparative politics and policy of health. Three major questions present themselves: First, some of the countries considered to be most prepared-having the greatest capacity for outbreak response-have failed to respond effectively to the pandemic. How should our understanding of capacity shift in light of COVID-19, and how can we incorporate political capacity into thinking about pandemic preparedness? Second, several of the mechanisms through which democracy has been shown to be beneficial for health have not traveled well to explain the performance of governments in this pandemic. Is there an authoritarian advantage in disease response? Third, after decades in which coercive public health measures have increasingly been considered counterproductive, COVID-19 has inspired widespread embrace of rigid lockdowns, isolation, and quarantine enforced by police. Will these measures prove effective in the long run and reshape public health thinking? This article explores some of these questions with emerging examples, even amid the pandemic, when it is too soon to draw conclusions.