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COVID-19, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoV-2 (SARS CoV-2), has become a global burden. The naive era of infection prompted early dependence on case reports of insufficient data and conceptual elucidation to explain and anticipate the effect on cardiovascular diseases. Many COVID-19-infected and vaccinated individuals have reported an increased incidence of cardiovascular disorders, leading to higher morbidity and mortality rates. Sometimes COVID can also manifest as a severe coronary artery disease or myocarditis in those with no background in cardiovascular diseases or those with cardiovascular risk factors, which are often misunderstood as a primary cardiovascular disorder. COVID-induced cardiovascular complications like DVT, VTE, MI, and long COVID have been the crux of the matter. To combat the SARS-CoV-2 disease, several countries took the lead in developing COVID-19 vaccines, but only a few were effective against coronavirus, which created a ray of hope in curbing COVID-19 disease. As the thumb rule says, any substance that is foreign to the body, including vaccines, has flaws seen in the forms of adverse effects/adverse events, which has created a great reluctance towards accepting COVID vaccine in society. Despite all this, it is proven that vaccines are effective in managing the COVID-19 situation worldwide, underlining the Darwinian notion.Copyright © 2023 are reserved by International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research.
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Introduction: The telemedicine center of our hospital provides expert consultation services to two rural districts of Punjab. The aim of this study was to assess its utility in Fine needle aspiration Cytology (FNAC) diagnostic service. Material(s) and Method(s): A 2-year retrospective audit from April 2020-2022 covering the COVID pandemic time was carried out on all cases of telecytopathology consultation files of the E-sanjeevani platform. A total of 75 cases whose FNAC smear images clicked by android smartphones with 48MP cameras and sent by Whatsapp to the E-Sanjeevani administrator were included. The images along with brief case clinical details were e-mailed for expert opinion to the cytopathologist (RS). The image quality, ability to provide a diagnosis, site-wise differences and comparison of the referral and expert review diagnosis was made. Result(s): The ages of the patients ranged from 4-80 years (2 children, 73 adults), with 25 males and 50 females. The sites of FNA performed at the district hospital were lymph nodes (22), breast (21), thyroid (15), soft tissue (8), salivary gland (2), skin (4), lip (2) and glans penis (1). The number of Whatsapp images evaluated ranged from 3-20 with median of 11 per case. They were in JPEG file format with size ranging from 40-163kb. Image quality was rated visually as good, medium, and poor in 46 (61%), 21m (28%) and 8(11%) cases respectively. There was no distortion of images upon enlarging them for better visualization on a large monitor. Best accuracy was obtained in breast and lymph nodes FNA. Soft tissue FNA was difficult to interpret and was inconclusive in 3/8 cases. Conclusion(s): Telecytopathology by Whatsapp is simple, quick, feasible and very useful to provide expert opinion in FNAC of various sites thereby enabling the pathologist in the district hospital setting. (Figure Presented).
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Objectives: The vast amount of facemasks generated as waste should be disposed of appropriately and responsibly to prevent adverse effects on health and the environment. This study aims to assess the knowledge and methods commonly practiced by the public to disinfect and dispose of used facemasks. Method(s): A cross-sectional study was conducted from June 2021 to December 2021 in the South Part of Karnataka using a face-validated questionnaire. The questionnaire included subject demographic details and methods to disinfect and dispose of masks. The data were recorded and analyzed using Microsoft Excel. Result(s): A total of (n=501) participants took part in the study. This study observed that the most commonly practiced method was to wash the masks with specific cleaners (n=259, 53%). We also assessed knowledge regarding the methods of disposal of a mask. The majority of the participants in our study are aware of the correct method for disposal of used masks(n=342, 68.26%), while (n=159, 31.73%) of subjects are not aware of the right facemask disposal method. Subjects who are educated (p=0.008) and regular mask users (p=0.011) are aware of the right method for mask disposal. Conclusion(s): Many people are unaware of the correct disposal methods. Hence, Manufacturers and Scientists should identify an effective way to disinfect and dispose of used masks and educate the public to practice the proper method of facemask disposal.Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Innovare Academic Sciences Pvt Ltd.
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Introduction: The telemedicine center of our hospital provides expert consultation services to two rural districts of Punjab. The aim of this study was to assess its utility in Fine needle aspiration Cytology (FNAC) diagnostic service. Material(s) and Method(s): A 2-year retrospective audit from April 2020-2022 covering the COVID pandemic time was carried out on all cases of telecytopathology consultation files of the E-sanjeevani platform. A total of 75 cases whose FNAC smear images clicked by android smartphones with 48MP cameras and sent by Whatsapp to the E-Sanjeevani administrator were included. The images along with brief case clinical details were e-mailed for expert opinion to the cytopathologist (RS). The image quality, ability to provide a diagnosis, site-wise differences and comparison of the referral and expert review diagnosis was made. Result(s): The ages of the patients ranged from 4-80 years (2 children, 73 adults), with 25 males and 50 females. The sites of FNA performed at the district hospital were lymph nodes (22), breast (21), thyroid (15), soft tissue (8), salivary gland (2), skin (4), lip (2) and glans penis(1). The number of Whatsapp images evaluated ranged from 3-20 with median of 11 per case. They were in JPEG file format with size ranging from 40-163kb. Image quality was rated visually as good, medium, and poor in 46 (61%), 21m (28%) and 8(11%) cases respectively. There was no distortion of images upon enlarging them for better visualization on a large monitor. Best accuracy was obtained in breast and lymph nodes FNA. Soft tissue FNA was difficult to interpret and was inconclusive in 3/8 cases. Conclusion(s): Telecytopathology by Whatsapp is simple, quick, feasible and very useful to provide expert opinion in FNAC of various sites thereby enabling the pathologist in the district hospital setting. [Formula presented] Copyright © 2022
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We examine the role of firm-initiated social media communication using Twitter in mitigating the negative impact of large-scale disruptions, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, on the shareholder value of firms. We develop our hypotheses using signaling theory and test them using data collected from Twitter and Bloomberg (R). Our data set consists of 121,988 firm-generated tweets from 467 S&P 500 firms collected in March 2020 at the time of the lockdown announcement in the United States. We find that frequent and relevant communication reduces latency and increases the observability of messages, preserving a firm's shareholder value. We also find that a positive outlook and extent of interest from stakeholders results in preserving shareholder value. On average, firms lost about 1.08% of their market value per day (about 9.72% during the 9-day period around the lockdown announcement). Our study contributes to the extant literature in three ways: (1) adds to the literature on disruptions-shareholder value by considering large-scale disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic, (2) highlights informational and communication elements of risk management strategy, and (3) adds to the growing body of literature on Twitter by considering firm-generated tweets. The results of our study are of importance to managers as well. For instance, firms tweeted about 57 times per week, and each additional tweet could preserve about $5.85 million of a firm's market valuation, on average. Also, it is not enough that the firms took appropriate actions during a large-scale disruption;they also need to communicate their actions and its implications to their stakeholders effectively. These results can help managers devise their Twitter communication strategy during large-scale disruptions.
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Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an emerging technology whose capabilities to self-organize itself on-the-fly, to monitor the patient's vital health data without any manual entry and assist early human intervention gave birth to smart healthcare applications. The smart applications can be used to remotely monitor isolated patients during this COVID-19 pandemic. Remote patient monitoring provides an opportunity for COVID-19 patients to have vital signs and other indicators recorded regularly and inexpensively to provide rapid and early warning of conditions that require medical attention using secured edge and cloud computing. However, to gain the confidence of the users over these applications, the performance of healthcare applications should be evaluated in real-time. Our real-time implementation of IoMT based remote monitoring application using edge and cloud computing, along with empirical evaluation, show that COVID-19 patients can be monitored effectively not only with mobility but also helps the health care professionals to generate consolidated health data of the patient that can guide them to obtain medical attention. © 2021 IEEE.
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With the recent advances in human sensing, the push to integrate human mobility tracking with epidemic modeling highlights the lack of groundwork at the mesoscale (e.g., city-level) for both contact tracing and transmission dynamics. Although GPS data has been used to study city-level outbreaks in the past, existing approaches fail to capture the path of infection at the individual level. Consequently, in this paper, we extend epidemics prediction from estimating the size of an outbreak at the population level to estimating the individuals who may likely get infected within a finite period of time. To this end, we propose a network science based method to first build and then prune the dynamic contact networks for recurring interactions;these networks can serve as the backbone topology for mechanistic epidemics modeling. We test our method using Foursquare's Points of Interest (POI) smart phone geolocation data from over 1.3 million devices to better approximate the COVID-19 infection curves for two major (yet very different) US cities, (i.e., Austin and New York City), while maintaining the granularity of individual transmissions and reducing model uncertainty. Our method provides a foundation for building a disease prediction framework at the mesoscale that can help both policy makers and individuals better understand their estimated state of health and help the pandemic mitigation efforts. © 2021 ACM.
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COVID-19 drove universities throughout the world forcing Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to go online or virtual. Admissions advertising and student recruitment were two of the sectors that were severely hit. Internet-based advertising has to entirely replace the old advertising environment. Although certain institutions were still able to conduct virtual tours, forums, and information sessions, the amount of involvement differed among colleges and universities. An exploratory study was conducted to investigate how effective Internet advertisements were in influencing students' admission decisions. During the academic year, 2020-21 at several institutions in India's western region, data were collected using the snowball sampling approach on 930 freshly enrolled students. The findings show that the efficacy of Internet ads for university admission is negatively correlated with the student's age group. Surprisingly, the study discovered that both rural and urban students were equally interested in online ads, and that family background had no impact on receptiveness to internet advertisements. © 2021 The authors. All right reserved.
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SARS-CoV-2 and latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection are both highly co-prevalent in many parts of the globe. Whether exposure to SARS-CoV-2 influences the antigen specific immune responses in latent tuberculosis has not been investigated. We examined the baseline, mycobacterial antigen and mitogen induced cytokine and chemokine responses in latent tuberculosis (LTBI) individuals with or without SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity, LTBI negative individuals with SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity and healthy control (both LTBI and SARS-CoV-2 negative) individuals. Our results demonstrated that LTBI individuals with SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity (LTBI+/IgG +) were associated with increased levels of unstimulated and TB-antigen stimulated IFNγ, IL-2, TNFα, IL-17, IL-1ß, IL-6, IL-12, IL-4, CXCL1, CXCL9 and CXCL10 when compared to those without seropositivity (LTBI+/IgG-). In contrast, LTBI+/IgG+ individuals were associated with decreased levels of IL-5 and IL-10. No significant difference in the levels of cytokines/chemokines was observed upon mitogen stimulation between the groups. SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity was associated with enhanced unstimulated and TB-antigen stimulated but not mitogen stimulated production of cytokines and chemokines in LTBI+ compared to LTBI negative individuals. Finally, most of these significant differences were not observed when LTBI negative individuals with SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity and controls were examined. Our data clearly demonstrate that both baseline and TB - antigen induced cytokine responses are augmented in the presence of SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity, suggesting an augmenting effect of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection on the immune responses of LTBI individuals.
Subject(s)
COVID-19/complications , Cytokines/blood , Latent Tuberculosis/complications , SARS-CoV-2/immunology , Aged , Aged, 80 and over , Antibodies, Viral/blood , Antigens, Bacterial/immunology , COVID-19/immunology , Chemokines/blood , Female , Humans , Immunocompromised Host , Immunoglobulin G/blood , Inflammation , Latent Tuberculosis/blood , Latent Tuberculosis/immunology , Lymphocyte Activation/drug effects , Male , Middle Aged , Phytohemagglutinins/pharmacology , SeroconversionABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), remains a pandemic. Severe disease is associated with dysfunction of multiple organs, but some infected cells do not express ACE2, the canonical entry receptor for SARS-CoV-2. Here, we report that the C-type lectin receptor L-SIGN interacted in a Ca2+-dependent manner with high-mannose-type N-glycans on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. We found that L-SIGN was highly expressed on human liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) and lymph node lymphatic endothelial cells but not on blood endothelial cells. Using high-resolution confocal microscopy imaging, we detected SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins within the LSECs from liver autopsy samples from patients with COVID-19. We found that both pseudo-typed virus enveloped with SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and authentic SARS-CoV-2 virus infected L-SIGN-expressing cells relative to control cells. Moreover, blocking L-SIGN function reduced CoV-2-type infection. These results indicate that L-SIGN is a receptor for SARS-CoV-2 infection. LSECs are major sources of the clotting factors vWF and factor VIII (FVIII). LSECs from liver autopsy samples from patients with COVID-19 expressed substantially higher levels of vWF and FVIII than LSECs from uninfected liver samples. Our data demonstrate that L-SIGN is an endothelial cell receptor for SARS-CoV-2 that may contribute to COVID-19-associated coagulopathy.
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COVID-19 , Capillaries , Cell Adhesion Molecules/metabolism , Endothelial Cells , Lectins, C-Type/metabolism , Liver/blood supply , Lymphatic Vessels , Receptors, Cell Surface/metabolism , SARS-CoV-2/physiology , COVID-19/metabolism , COVID-19/pathology , COVID-19/virology , Capillaries/metabolism , Capillaries/pathology , Capillaries/virology , Endothelial Cells/metabolism , Endothelial Cells/pathology , Endothelial Cells/virology , Gene Expression Profiling/methods , Humans , Liver/pathology , Lymphatic Vessels/metabolism , Lymphatic Vessels/pathology , Lymphatic Vessels/virology , Spike Glycoprotein, Coronavirus , Virus InternalizationABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has crippled life, families and oral healthcare delivery in India due to nationwide lockdown. AIM: Through cross-sectional design, we investigated the impact of child's dental pain, caregiver's fear of SARS-CoV-2 and parental distress on oral health-related quality of life (OHRQOL) of preschoolers during the nationwide COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. DESIGN: Preschool children self-reported their pain using Pieces of Hurt scale; caregiver SARS-CoV-2 fear was assessed using Fear of COVID-19 scale and parental distress evaluated using 4-item scale. Child's oral health was assessed using the dmft index and OHRQOL evaluated using early childhood oral health impact scale. Bivariate, multivariate regression analysis was conducted to identify predictors; statistical significance was set at 5%. RESULTS: Sample mean age was 4.58 years, and about 69% were boys. Children reporting higher pain scores (OR = 1.9) due to decayed teeth and having dmft > 5 (OR = 4.25), followed by greater parental distress (OR = 4.13) and fear of SARS-CoV-2 (OR = 3.84), were significantly associated with poor OHRQOL during the COVID-19 pandemic. CONCLUSIONS: Greater parental distress and fear of COVID-19 among caregivers, higher self-perceived dental pain among children and caries experience are associated with poor OHRQOL of preschool children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Coronavirus , Dental Caries , Child , Child, Preschool , Communicable Disease Control , Cross-Sectional Studies , Dental Caries/epidemiology , Fear , Humans , India/epidemiology , Male , Oral Health , Pain , Pandemics , Parents , Quality of Life , SARS-CoV-2 , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
In recent months, the dissemination of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world was worrying. The use of face mask is important in order to slow down the rate of transmission of COVID-19 to humans, according to guidelines from the World Health Organisation (WHO). The use and manufacture of facial masks and other components (gloves, facial protectors, protection suits, safety shoes), made of polymeric materials like antiviral textiles, most of whom end in microplastic ponds, has been dramatically increased by this pandemic. The South America focus reflects an environmental issue, the use and mismanagement of this form of personal protective apparatus (PPE) 1,2. In addition, the use of plastics in a single use is being increased and the plastic recycling is being decreased as a result of the pandemic curfew, more waste from plastic is exacerbating on coasts and beaches. Researchers have recently developed nano-particles Ag and Cu for PPE antiviral polymeric textile technology to reduce contamination and spread of COVID-19. Antiviral polymer waste may, since they are a big emerging class of pollutants, have a long-term detrimental impact on marine ecosystems. This research also focuses on the broader use of plastics in beaches and the coast, which could raise the risks to aquatic organisms in the coming years, as well as the possibilities of the COVID-19 pandemic. The possible effects of the pandemic on waste management programmes and future study recommendations to develop adaptive coastal management policies are also discussed3,4
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The proposed study was aimed to find the significant elements of service quality in restaurants of Connaught Place, New Delhi from client's point of view after post COVID 19. An organized survey on five point Likert scale was utilized to gather the essential information. Three well known restaurants were chosen and information was gathered from the 500 nearby clients of New Delhi. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed to determine the elements of service quality which are relied upon to impact client's assessment for restaurants services. Four critical variables were distinguished after the examination in particular. Interactional and Outcome Quality, Hygiene and Behavioral Intention, Physical Environment and Hedonic Attitude toward a restaurants brand. Total 74.17 percent variation has been explained by the variables. It was discovered that interactional and Outcome Quality is the most critical influencing factor among the four recognized components. This paper explores the food systems in the era of the Post COVID-19 pandemic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research (09752366) is the property of Association of Indian Pharmacist and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
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The world is battling COVID-19 and economies across the globe have declared a lockdown. Work from home (WFH) has become the norm, especially for service organizations. Following government instructions, even the academic institutions had to shut down temporarily, affecting academic delivery. Thus, they had to find new alternatives to academic delivery, and virtual classes were the way forward. In the present paper, we attempted to study the impact of lockdown on the teaching – learning process. The objective of the study was to assess the adoption rate for virtual classes and to determine the various benefits, challenges, and reasons for non-adoption of virtual classes. The study considered responses from 341 teachers of higher education institutions (HEIs) of Ghaziabad region. The study was divided into two parts. One set of respondents were those who adopted virtual classrooms and another set that did not adopt virtual classrooms. Descriptive statistics and t-test were performed to analyze the data collected through primary sources. Among those who adopted virtual mode, the mean of actual benefits was significantly less than the mean of expected benefits. Network issues, lack of training, and lack of awareness were stated to be the major challenges faced by them. Lack of awareness was stated to be the most important reason by those who did not adopt virtual classrooms followed by lack of interest and doubts regarding the usefulness of virtual classes. Less attendance, lack of personal touch, and lack of interaction due to connectivity issues were found to be the significant drawbacks of virtual classes. The study also suggested the ways to overcome the above challenges, drawbacks, and reasons behind non-adoption of virtual classes. © 2020, Associated Management Consultants Pvt. Ltd.. All rights reserved.