[Cross-sectional study on the use of masks among occupational groups with high-risk positions for overseas import and pollution transmission].

Objective: To investigate the wearing of masks and the knowledge of masks among high-risk positions for overseas import and pollution transmission. Methods: From May 14 to 17, 2022, a convenient sampling method was used to conduct an online survey among 963 workers in high-risk positions for overseas import and pollution transmission in Beijing. The behaviors of individual use and wearing masks, the distribution and supervision of the unit, the knowledge of personal mask protection and the subjective feelings of wearing masks were analyzed. The χ(2) test and logistic regression model were used to analyze the influencing factors of the correct selection of masks. Results: The majority of the workers in high-risk positions for overseas import and pollution transmission were male (86.0%, 828/963), age concentration in 18-44 years old (68.2%, 657/963), and the majority of them had college or bachelor degrees (49.4%, 476/963). 79.4%(765/963) of the workers chose the right type of masks, female, 45-59 years old and high school education or above were the risk factors for correct selection of masks (P <0.05). Workers had good behaviors such as wearing/removing masks, but only 10.5% (101/963) could correctly rank the protective effect of different masks. 98.4% (948/963) of the workers believed that their work units had provided masks to their employees, and 99.1% (954/963) and 98.2%(946/963) of them had organized training and supervision on the use of masks, respectively. 47.4%(456/963) of the workers were uncomfortable while wearing masks. Conclusion: The overall selection and use of masks among occupational groups in high-risk positions for overseas import and pollution transmission in China need to be further standardized. It is necessary to strengthen supervision and inspection on the use of masks among occupational groups, and take improvement measures to improve the comfort of wearing masks.

The separation membranes in artificial organs

Separation membranes play a crucial role in the functioning of artificial organs, such as hemodialysis machines, membrane oxygenators, and artificial liver models. The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of these technologies in the medical community. However, membrane technology in artificial organs faces significant challenges, such as the clearance of low-middle-molecule and protein-bound toxins and limited blood compatibility. In this review, we will discuss the separation mechanisms, separation performance, and biocompatibility of different types of separation membranes used in artificial organs. We will also highlight the opportunities and challenges for next-generation membrane technology in this field, including the need for improved clearance of toxins and increased blood compatibility, as well as the potential for microfluidic devices.

Healthcare Built Environment and Telemedicine Practice for Social and Environmental Sustainability

The practice of telemedicine started at the beginning of the 20th century but has never been widely implemented, even though it is significantly sustainable compared to traveling to healthcare However, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic pushed organisations and patients to accept this technology. During the pandemic, telemedicine consultations took place in ad hoc environments without much preparation and planning. As a result, there is a knowledge gap in the field between telemedicine's clinical care services and healthcare built environment, in terms of design. This research focused on addressing the quality of service and experience of telemedicine in primary healthcare settings and how this could be influenced by the digital infrastructure. Our aim was to understand the correlations between telemedicine and healthcare built environment and whether the latter could have a significant impact on telemedicine practice. The methodology included interviews with professionals involved in healthcare planning, architecture and ethnography, and end user research involving telemedicine sessions. The interviews highlighted that professionals involved in the design of healthcare environments demonstrated limited consideration of telemedicine environments. Yet, the ethnographic, end-user research identified areas where the telemedicine environment could affect user experience and should be taken into consideration in the design of such spaces. © 2023 by the authors.

The reliability and integrity of overall survival data based on follow-up records only and potential solutions to the challenges

Overall survival (OS) is considered the standard clinical endpoint to support effectiveness claims in new drug applications globally, particularly for lethal conditions such as cancer. However, the source and reliability of OS in the setting of clinical trials have seldom been doubted and discussed. This study first raised the common issue that data integrity and reliability are doubtful when we collect OS information or other time-to-event endpoints based solely on simple follow-up records by investigators without supporting material, especially since the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic. Then, two rounds of discussions with 30 Chinese experts were held and 12 potential source scenarios of three methods for obtaining the time of death of participants, including death certificate, death record and follow-up record, were sorted out and analysed. With a comprehensive assessment of the 12 scenarios by legitimacy, data reliability, data acquisition efficiency, difficulty of data acquisition, and coverage of participants, both short-term and long-term recommended sources, overall strategies and detailed measures for improving the integrity and reliability of death date are presented. In the short term, we suggest integrated sources such as public security systems made available to drug inspection centres appropriately as soon as possible to strengthen supervision. Death certificates provided by participants' family members and detailed standard follow-up records are recommended to investigators as the two channels of mutual compensation, and the acquisition of supporting materials is encouraged as long as it is not prohibited legally. Moreover, we expect that the sharing of electronic medical records and the legal disclosure of death records in established health registries can be realized with the joint efforts of the whole industry in the long-term. The above proposed solutions are mainly based on the context of China and can also provide reference for other countries in the world. © 2022 The Authors

Analytic hierarchy clustering research of all cargo airlines based on safety information

Due to the COVID-19, air passenger transport industry is sluggishm. At the same time, based on the strong demand for freight business. Airlines focus on developing cargo sector. All-cargo airlines are gradually being established. The number of registered cargo aircraft has gradually increased in recent years,and cargo transport flight hours are gradually increasing. This leads to an increase in cargo aviation security incidents. The safety information analysis of cargo aircraft needs to be solved urgently. In this paper, a hierarchical analysis and clustering research on all-cargo airlines based on China aviaiton safety information data is carried out. The results show that all-cargo airlines security incidents are divided into three categories. The paper provides security recommendations for different incident categories. © 2022 IEEE.

A Deep Learning Based Method For COVID-19 Classification Using Chest CT Images

At the beginning of 2020, coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) infection spread in Wuhan, China and all over the world. Until April, it had affected millions of people. The computed tomography (CT) imaging is confirmed as one of the assessment method for COVID-19 patients. However distinguish the COVID-19 from those CT images is extremely challenging as it is very time-consuming, and lack of the experienced radiologists. So deep learning based approaches are proposed to triage the COVID-19 images from the normal or other pneumonia images. Here, we proposed a novel global average pooling (GAP) method for the deep neural network to improve the performance of the COVID-19 classification. The novel GAP method is using lung mask region as weighting factor for GAP, which reduce the influence of background region and highlight the classification features of interesting tissue region. The result of our method achieved the triage of COVID-19 with sensitivity 96.4 % and specificity 93.3 % on the independence validation dataset with 2062 CT scans. © 2022 IEEE.

Research on Prediction Model of COVID-19 Based on Deep Learning

The accurate prediction of COVID-19 is of great significance for the prevention and control of the epidemic. Based on the current situation and demand of COVID-19 prediction research, this paper mainly analyzes the convolutional neural network (CNN) model by using the deep learning algorithm, It uses 1dcnn model and Gabor filter to build the G-ldcnn model, and introduces back propagation to update The model has the high-efficiency learning ability of CNN model and the feature extraction ability of Gabor filter at the model. The model has the high-efficiency learning ability of CNN model and the feature extraction ability of Gabor filter at the same time, improves the prediction efficiency of the model while ensuring the accuracy, and can better adapt to By comparing the prediction model proposed in this paper with the current By comparing the prediction model proposed in this paper with the current mature model, it shows that the improved and optimized model has a high accuracy. © 2022 IEEE.

TIME TO EXPAND THE USE OF CASIRIVIMAB/IMDEVIMAB MONOCLONAL ANTIBODY THERAPY? A CASE OF COMPASSIONATE USE IN SEVERE COVID-19 PNEUMONIA

SESSION TITLE: COVID-19 Case Report Posters 1 SESSION TYPE: Case Report Posters PRESENTED ON: 10/17/2022 12:15 pm - 01:15 pm INTRODUCTION: The FDA limits REGEN-COV (Casirivimab/Imdevimab) use to asymptomatic adults at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19 pneumonia or post-exposure prophylaxis. Here, we present a case of compassionate use of REGEN-COV in severe COVID-19 pneumonia. CASE PRESENTATION: A 76-year-old male with a medical history significant for COPD, Rheumatoid arthritis (treated with hydroxychloroquine and low dose steroids), and monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) presented with one week of fever, cough, and fatigue. He was febrile to 103 F, with normal oxygen saturation on admission. SARS-CoV-2 rapid molecular PCR was positive. He was started on Levofloxacin, but he did not meet the criteria for administration of dexamethasone, remdesivir, or monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapy. On day one of admission, he became hypoxemic and was subsequently started on dexamethasone and remdesivir. He was given convalescent plasma to address inadequate antibody response to COVID-19 immunization secondary to his chronic immunosuppressed/immunodeficient state. His hypoxemia continued to worsen, requiring high-flow nasal cannula oxygen (HFNC). A regimen of tocilizumab was also initiated. CT chest angiography ruled out pulmonary embolism but revealed diffuse bilateral patchy opacities. His oxygen requirements continued to increase with decreasing ROX index and hence was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. Repeat PCR for SARS-COV-2 was significant for a high viral load. Approval for compassionate use of REGEN-COV was obtained and administered to the patient. Following administration, his symptoms improved significantly with the transition from HFNC to simple nasal cannula oxygen. Repeat PCR for SARS-CoV-2 also showed a remarkable decline of the viral load. He was transferred back to the medical floors and later to the skilled nursing facility once he was clinically more stable. DISCUSSION: In the United States, REGEN-COV (Casirivimab/Imdevimab) treatment has been approved for emergency use since November 2020. The combination of these two neutralizing immunoglobulin gamma 1 (IgG1) mAb attacks the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and has been shown to effectively prevent the progression of symptomatic COVID-19 pneumonia and decrease the high viral load of SARS-CoV-2. It also reduces COVID-19 related hospitalization or death, especially in immunosuppressed patients. Our patient received dexamethasone, remdesivir, tocilizumab, and convalescent plasma as part of conventional COVID-19 treatment with continued worsening of COVID-19 pneumonia. However, the compassionate use of REGEN-COV led to rapid clinical improvement of the patient's symptoms and reduced the SARS-CoV-2 viral load. CONCLUSIONS: Hence, physicians and FDA should consider expanding the use of REGEN-COV mAB therapy to immunosuppressed patients with rapidly worsening COVID-19 pneumonia in adjunct to conventional COVID-19 treatment. Reference #1: Stein D, Oviedo-Orta E, Kampman WA, McGinniss J, Betts G, McDermott M, Holly B, Lancaster JM, Braunstein N, Yancopoulos GD, Weinreich DM. Compassionate Use of REGEN-COV ® in Patients with COVID-19 and Immunodeficiency-Associated Antibody Disorders. Clin Infect Dis. 2021 Dec 31:ciab1059. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciab1059. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34971385;PMCID: PMC8755381. Reference #2: O'Brien MP, Forleo-Neto E, Musser BJ, Isa F, Chan KC, Sarkar N, Bar KJ, Barnabas RV, Barouch DH, Cohen MS, Hurt CB, Burwen DR, Marovich MA, Hou P, Heirman I, Davis JD, Turner KC, Ramesh D, Mahmood A, Hooper AT, Hamilton JD, Kim Y, Purcell LA, Baum A, Kyratsous CA, Krainson J, Perez-Perez R, Mohseni R, Kowal B, DiCioccio AT, Stahl N, Lipsich L, Braunstein N, Herman G, Yancopoulos GD, Weinreich DM;Covid-19 Phase 3 Prevention Trial Team. Subcutaneous REGEN-COV Antibody Combination to Prevent Covid-19. N Engl J Med. 2021 Sep 23;385(13):1184-1195. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2109682. Epub 2021 Aug 4. PMID: 34347950;PMCI : PMC8362593. Reference #3: Weinreich DM, Sivapalasingam S, Norton T, Ali S, Gao H, Bhore R, Xiao J, Hooper AT, Hamilton JD, Musser BJ, Rofail D, Hussein M, Im J, Atmodjo DY, Perry C, Pan C, Mahmood A, Hosain R, Davis JD, Turner KC, Baum A, Kyratsous CA, Kim Y, Cook A, Kampman W, Roque-Guerrero L, Acloque G, Aazami H, Cannon K, Simón-Campos JA, Bocchini JA, Kowal B, DiCioccio AT, Soo Y, Geba GP, Stahl N, Lipsich L, Braunstein N, Herman G, Yancopoulos GD;Trial Investigators. REGEN-COV Antibody Combination and Outcomes in Outpatients with Covid-19. N Engl J Med. 2021 Dec 2;385(23):e81. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2108163. Epub 2021 Sep 29. PMID: 34587383;PMCID: PMC8522800. DISCLOSURES: No relevant relationships by Mubashir Ayaz Ahmed No relevant relationships by Shayet Hossain Eshan No relevant relationships by Sami Hussein No relevant relationships by Khalid Hussein No relevant relationships by Kamalnath Sankaran Rajagopalan No relevant relationships by Chenyu Sun

Transfer Learning and GRU-CRF Augmentation for Covid-19 Fake News Detection

The spread of fake news on online media is very dangerous and can lead to casualties, effects on psychology, character assassination, elections for political parties, and state chaos. Fake news that concerning Covid-19 massively spread during the pandemic. Detecting misinformation on the Internet is an essential and challenging task since humans face difficulty detecting fake news. We applied BERT and GPT2 as pre-trained using the BiGRU-Att-CapsuleNet model and BiGRU-CRF features augmentation to solve Fake News detection in Constraint @ AAAI2021-COVID19 Fake News Detection in English Dataset. This research proved that our hybrid model with augmentation got better accuracy compared to our baseline model. It also showed that BERT gave a better result than GPT2 in all models;the highest accuracy we achieved for BERT is 0.9196, and GPT2 is 0.8986. © 2022, ComSIS Consortium. All rights reserved.

Evaluation of high flow local extraction for controlling aerosol plumes in operating theaters

SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted through contact with fomite, respiratory droplets, and aerosolized viruses. Recent evidence suggests that aerosol transmission represents a significant route of infection. In relation to healthcare workers (HCWs), much attention has been focused on personal protective equipment, yet this is the lowest level of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hierarchy of controls. Although engineering controls are prominent in the hierarchy, little attention has been given to developing effective interventions. This study aims to evaluate the performance of a simple extraction device in a clinical setting. This was accomplished by using a high flow local extraction (HFLE) that was connected to the existing ventilation system of the hospital on one end and to an intake nozzle near the patient's airway on the other end. Propylene glycol was aerosolized through a physiological test apparatus to simulate the breath of a patient. The field of interest was illuminated using a laser sheet in two planes from the model, namely, the sagittal plane and the transverse plane, and the movement of the simulated aerosol was recorded using a video camera to assess the dispersion of the aerosol qualitatively. In the meantime, the concentration of the aerosol particles was measured using a particle meter to evaluate the effectiveness of the extraction quantitatively. It was found that the HFLE device could effectively reduce the dispersion of the exhaled aerosols to undetectable levels when it was positioned within 250 mm from the mouth. This result has significance in the safety of HCWs involved in the management of patients with infectious diseases and may also have potential applications in other clinical areas with high airflow in the ventilation systems. © 2022 Author(s).

Time-varying pure contagion effect between energy and nonenergy commodity markets

This paper combines the Kalman filtering technique and the time-varying parameter vector autoregression model with stochastic volatility model to explore pure contagion effects between energy and nonenergy (i.e., industrial metals, precious metals, and agricultural) commodity markets. Empirical results show the significant pure contagion effects between energy and industrial metals markets in most periods, while pure contagion effects between energy and precious metals and agricultural markets occur only in a few specific periods. Comparing the level of pure contagion effects between different commodity markets, energy is still the main price transmitter. In addition, with the acceleration of the global commodity market financialization process, the frequency and harm of pure contagion effects are gradually increasing. Notably, the COVID-19 pandemic is emerging as another major crisis after the global financial crisis, exacerbating the pure contagion effects between energy and precious metals and agricultural markets. © 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Electroencephalography and Self-assessment Evaluation of Engagement with Online Exhibitions: Case Study of Google Arts and Culture

The COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to have an unprecedented impact on museums and exhibition galleries worldwide, with online visitors to museums and exhibitions increasing significantly. The most common method used by web user experience researchers to study user engagement is questionnaires, usually conducted after the user has completed the website experience and relying on the user’s memory and lingering feelings. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new method of assessment based on a combination of user electroencephalography (EEG) signals and a self-assessment questionnaire (UES-SF). Since EEG signal measurement is a practical method to detect sequential changes in brain activity without significant time delays, it can comprehend visitors’ unconscious and sensory responses to online exhibitions. This paper employed the Google Arts & Culture (GA&C) website as an example to study 4 different exhibition formats and their impact on user engagement. The questionnaire results showed that the “game interaction” was significantly higher (p < 0.05) in terms of participation than the “2D information Kiosks” and “3D virtual exhibitions” and was the marginally significant (0.05 < p < 0.10) than “video explanation”. However, when we combined the EEG data, we could determine that “game interaction” had the highest user engagement, followed by “video explanation”, “3D virtual exhibition”, and the “2D information kiosk”. Therefore, our new evaluation approach can assist online exhibition user experience researchers in understanding the impact of different forms of interaction on engagement more comprehensively. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Implementation of a coplanar-waveguide chip for the measurement of EM wave absorption spectrum of SARS-Cov-2 virus

Currently, aerosol is considered as the major route for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. A safe sterilization method with an excellent penetration capability and ability to sterilize free spaces is urgently needed. Previously it has been experimentally demonstrated that microwave-based sterilization can effectively inactivate the H3N2 Influenza A virus through the structure-resonant energy transfer (SRET) effect with a radiation field intensity following the IEEE standard. In order to utilize the same mechanism to inactivate the SARS-CoV-2 virus, firstly, the structural resonant frequencies with electromagnetic (EM) waves have to be identified. In this paper we report our design and implementation of a spectrum measurement chip utilizing the coplanar waveguide with pre-printed mask. With the mask, the repeatability of the insertion loss measurement can be well-controlled. Our microwave absorption spectra results revealed that the coplanar-waveguide chip can identify the resonant microwave frequencies of difference viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 viruses, highlighting the potential applications for not only the virus detection but also the safe and non-thermal sterilization of public spaces. During the presentation, we will also report the resonant EM wave frequencies of various corona viruses monitored by the aforementioned chip. Copyright © 2022 SPIE.

CHARACTERIZING THE USE OF TWITTER AMONGST ACADEMIC UROLOGISTS

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The dramatic reduction of clinical and research activities within medicine during COVID-19, coupled with virtual electives and conferences, have all posed important implications within academics. Given the heavy reliance on virtual interaction during the pandemic and the active role that social media (SoMe) has, our study aims to characterize the state of SoMe use among current academic urology faculty. METHODS: We identified residency programs utilizing the American Urological Association (AUA) website. All MD/DO faculty information including gender, program location, and subspecialty training was recorded. After the designation of all faculty and their Twitter handles, Twitter Development API was set up with required authorizations and tokens. Python and R were used as the supporting language and setup using Anaconda Navigator. RESULTS: We identified 143 residency programs with a total of 2,377 faculty (1,975 males and 402 females). Among all faculty, 945 (39.75%) had registered Twitter accounts with the majority being male =760 (80.40%) vs 185 (19.60%)] (Figure 1a). Proportionately, female urologists were more likely to have a registered Twitter account (Figure 1a). Differences among specialty and SoMe use were also evident, with oncology (48%) and endourology (47.24%) among male faculty representing the highest registered user accounts (Figure 1b). When assessing registered accounts by gender across all faculty, there was no notable change during COVID (2019-2020), with peak for male faculty in 2014 (10.05% of all accounts registered) and peak for female faculty in 2015 (Figure 1c). The top five hashtags by occurrence were #prostatecancer, #urology, #bladdercancer, #covid19, and #aua19 among males, female faculty extending #sexmed as an additional common hashtag. When assessing faculty representation on Twitter, The University of Colorado (69.57%), Mayo Clinic Rochester (67.86%), and Case Western Reserve (65.22%) had the most represented faculty on SoMe proportional to the size of their program (Figure 1d). CONCLUSIONS: There is a steady increase in Twitter representation among academic urology, largely unaffected by COVID. While the majority of Twitter representation is largely skewed toward male faculty, there has been a steady increase in female faculty representation across all subspecialties over the last 16 years.

Fed2KD: Heterogeneous Federated Learning for Pandemic Risk Assessment via Two-Way Knowledge Distillation

The world has suffered a lot from the COVID-19 pandemic. Though vaccines have been developed, we still need to be ready for its variants and other possible pandemics in the future. To provide people with pandemic risk assessments without violating privacy, a Federated Learning (FL) framework is envisioned. However, most existing FL frameworks can only work for homogeneous models, i.e., models with the same configuration, ignoring the preferences of the users and the various properties of their devices. To this end, we propose a novel two-way knowledge distillation-based FL framework, Fed2KD. The knowledge exchange between the global and local models is achieved by distilling the information into or out from a tiny model with unified configuration. Nonetheless, the distillation cannot be conducted without a common dataset. To solve this bottleneck, we leverage the Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to generate data that will be used as a proxy dataset for distillation. The proposed framework is firstly evaluated on benchmark datasets (MNIST and FashionMNIST) to test its performance against existing models such as Federated Averaging (FedAvg). The performance of Fed2KD improves by up to 30% on MNIST dataset, and 18% on FashionMNIST when data is non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) as compared to FedAvg. Then, Fed2KD is evaluated on the pandemic risk assessment tasks through a mobile APP we developed, namely DP4coRUna, which provides indoor risk prediction. © 2022 IFIP.

Study on the influencing factors of health information sharing behavior of the elderly under the background of normalization of pandemic situation

This study aims to solve the problem of unwise judgment, decisions, and correspondingly dangerous behaviors caused by error health information to the elderly. Based on the MOA model and self-determination theory, this paper constructs a health information sharing model for the elderly and analyzes it with Amos's structural equation model. The study finds that media richness, health information literacy, perceived benefits, and negative emotions of the coronavirus epidemic positively influence health information sharing behavior. In contrast, perceived risks have a significant negative impact on health information sharing behavior. At the same time, media richness positively affects health information literacy, perceived benefits, and negative emotions of the coronavirus epidemic but has no significant impact on perceived risks. Health literacy positively affects perceived benefits but does not significantly affect the perceived risks and negative emotions of the coronavirus epidemic. This study aims to assist government and online social platforms in taking relevant measures under the background of normalization of the pandemic situation, controlling the spread of error health information among the elderly, and guiding the elderly to share health information better. © 2021 International Consortium for Electronic Business. All rights reserved.

Optimal trade policy and welfare in a differentiated duopoly

This study considers a differentiated duopoly, including domestic and foreign enterprises, in trade, analyzes the impacts of product differentiation and productivity variance on equilibrium results, and explores the optimal trade policy in different competition modes. We find that differentiated products can boost the supply of foreign enterprises in a Cournot competition. In a home-leading Stackelberg duopoly, increasing tariffs decreases consumer surplus but improves the home country's social welfare. The optimum-welfare tariff of a home-leading Stackelberg duopoly cannot exceed that of the foreign-leading Stackelberg duopoly. An easy or tight tariff policy can be optimal, depending on the parameters and duopoly modes.

Photoaging Characteristics of Disposable Masks under UV Irradiation

The global outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to an extreme increase in the use of disposable masks. If the used disposable masks are not appropriately disposed of, they will enter the natural environment and lead to environmental pollution. In order to understand the impacts of disposable masks after being disposed of into the natural environment, aging experiments with simulated natural conditions were performed on the outer, inner, and middle layers of the masks to verify the aging characteristics of disposable masks. We analyzed the mechanical behavior, surface morphology, and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) spectra of disposable masks treated with different levels of UV irradiation to understand the possible changes in the masks under UV. Results showed that the elongation at break, tensile strength, and maximum force of all three polypropylene (PP) mask layers decreased after UV irradiation, indicating chemical bond breakage. In the process of photoaging, each layer of the disposable masks showed a different degree of microscopic surface changes after UV irradiation, and these changes gradually intensified with the extension of UV exposure time. FT-IR results showed that functional groups, such as hydroxyl and carbonyl groups increased in each layer after UV irradiation. The results of this study support that, although the different layers of the disposable masks are all made of PP, they age differently in the environment. With the ever-increasing number of disposable masks in the environment, we need to further study the aging and degradation of disposable masks to better understand their potential impacts on the environment in the future. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.