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Pandemic outbreaks can disrupt firms' normal operations, so they demand a resilient response. Firms can combine social responsibility initiatives with resilient responses by reconfiguring their production resources for pandemic relief. It remains unclear, however, whether pandemic-relieving product adaptation (in short, PRPA) improves financial performance. We draw on stakeholder theory to analyze the effect of a PRPA strategy on the stock returns of US-listed manufacturing firms during the COVID-19 pandemic—the most enduring and large-scale pandemic in recent history. The results reveal that the stock market reacts more positively to PRPA under severe pandemic circumstances and for firms with low political connectedness, low media coverage, and/or more unique production technology. The findings offer important implications for operations theory and practice. © 2023 Decision Sciences Institute.
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Discovered in December 2019, Coronavirus (Covid-19) is an infectious disease that has spread rapidly around the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic has increased the severity and amount of mental health problems, including depression, stress, and anxiety. This research uses real-life Covid-19 Tweets collected from March 2020 until October 2021. The objective is to analyze tweets from the US, UK, and India to discover Covid-19's impact on mental health in the three countries and identify influential users in each country when discussing this topic. The result shows that the major themes in the US were related to government and politics. Some dominant users in the US are news accounts and people who have occupations such as journalists, hosts, and presenters. The UK's theme focuses on relationships between friends and families, with doctors and medical workers as dominant users. India focuses on mental health and education, with dominant users including news-related accounts and some politicians. © 2022 Authors. All rights reserved.
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To prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and enhance the nutrition management for patients, the Beijing Quality Control and Improvement Center for Clinical Nutrition Therapy organized relevant experts to formulate "The Nutrition Management of Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 in the Hospital: An Expert Opinion (2020)". It clearly stated that food safety, food hygiene, and nutrition management should be incorporated into the whole process of prevention, control, treatment, and rehabilitation of COVID-19. The reasonable and standardized pathway of nutrition management, which includes nutrition-risk screening, malnutrition diagnosis, nutritional support therapy and nutrition monitoring, should be established to improve the immune status, clinical outcome, and quality of life of patients with COVID-19.Copyright © 2021, Peking Union Medical College Hospital. All rights reserved.
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This paper shines the light on how the critical outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic affected restaurant consumer's purchase behaviour. With a focus on omnichannel food ordering technology the context captures the rapid development of online sales channels for restaurants in Hong Kong. Particularly focusing on integrated ordering technologies with digital payment capabilities, such as: mobile applications, website, QR code self-service ordering applications. We conduct a longitudinal field experiment between June 2020 and January 2022 in cooperation with one of the vendors for omnichannel point of sale systems (OPOSS) in Hong Kong. The result captures a panel dataset with the total number of 23 restaurants that have been opened in a continuous order throughout the pandemic. The fixed effect regression model employs an additional dataset on Covid-19 daily cases obtained from census Hong Kong SAR Government data. We apply a moderating effect based on the type of sales channel used in the restaurants. The results show that during the pandemic, some restaurants implemented omnichannel technology to sustain restaurant sales. We observe that consumers start to use omnichannel restaurant ordering technologies during the pandemic outbreak. More importantly, we find supporting evidence that after the outbreak, the omnichannel technology use behaviour among consumers remains continuous. © 2022 ACM.
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The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in late 2019 threatens global health security. Computed tomography (CT) can provide richer information for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. Unfortunately, labeling of COVID-19 lesion chest CT images is an expensive affair. We solved the challenge of chest CT labeling by simply marking point annotations to the lesion areas, i.e., by marking individual pixels for each lesion area in the chest CT scan. It takes only a few seconds to complete the labeling using this labeling strategy. We also designed a lightweight segmentation model with approximately 10% of the number of model parameters of the conventional model. So, the proposed model segmented the lesions of a single image in only 0.05 s. In order to obtain the shape and size of lesions from point labels, the convex-hull based segmentation (CHS) loss function is proposed in this paper, which enables the model to obtain an approximate fully supervised performance on point labels. The experiments were compared with the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) point label segmentation methods on the COVID-19-CT-Seg dataset, and our model showed a large improvement: IoU improved by 28.85%, DSC improved by 28.91%, Sens improved by 13.75%, Spes improved by 1.18%, and MAE decreased by 1.10%. Experiments on the dataset show that the proposed model combines the advantages of lightweight and weak supervision, resulting in more accurate COVID-19 lesion segmentation results while having only a 10% performance difference with the fully supervised approach. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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This paper investigates the impact of financial conditions, for example, cross-border capital flows, interest rates and foreign exchange rates, on the well-being of the real estate developers in five Association of Southeast Asian Nations economies. The study uses a Bottom-up Default Analysis model to stress test their creditworthiness by reproducing the financial shocks during the global financial crisis, taper tantrum, and the U.S.-China trade war and COVID-19 pandemic. The median developers remain sound under the prescribed adversities. The performance is underpinned by their strong fundamentals and a conducive mix of monetary, foreign exchange, and open capital account policies by national authorities. © 2021 Western Economic Association International.
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The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic is causing once-in-a-century upheavals in global civilization. Payment systems have advanced lately, from simple cash or credit card transactions to various forms of mobile payment systems. This transformation is occurred due to COVID 19 and shifts in the economy, the growth of social networks, technical advancements on the Internet, and the increased usage of mobile devices. Throughout COVID19, this article offers a unique approach to the payment scheduling issue, which seeks out a timetable that enhances the project's stakeholders' benefit. Both the sponsor and the contractor in a project want to have a strong payment plan on their own. To create an equal schedule between the sponsor and the development team, the timing of payments and the completion periods of project activities are decided concurrently. The Harris hawks optimization method is designed to tackle the problem because of its high NP-hardness. Harris hawks optimization is a novel meta-heuristic nature-inspired optimizer inspired by how Harris hawks hunt food in nature. By comparing the suggested Harris hawks optimization optimizer to existing nature-inspired methods, the efficacy of the suggested Harris hawks optimization optimizer is determined. The Harris hawks optimization algorithm appears to be highly promising based on the statistical findings and comparisons. The MATLAB simulator's simulation findings confirm the algorithm's superiority over earlier efforts regarding energy, cost, delay time, and net value. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
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Background: A virus is a tiny agent, around one-hundredth the size of a bacterium which can infect cells of plants and animals. Seven coronaviruses are known to infect humans;three of them are serious, namely, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome, China, 2002), MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, Saudi Arabia, 2012), and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) (2019-2020). SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV belong to beta coronaviruses (betaCoVs). Objective(s): In this mini-review, we want to consider the importance of vitamin D and C, especially plants containing these two vitamins, in the fight against COVID-19. Method(s): The manuscript includes review articles, randomized control experiments, analytical studies, and observations, which have been gathered from different sources such as Google Scholar, Scopus, Science Direct, and PubMed. A literature review was carried out using keywords such as vitamin D, vitamin C, COVID-19, influenza, plant, and coronaviruses. Result(s): Various sources of vitamin D for humans are food, dietary supplements, and the skin by exposure to 7-dehydrocholesterol to ultraviolet light. There are some new findings on the influence of vitamin D in preventing and controlling influenza and COVID-19. Vitamin D may play a role in preventing influenza and COVID-19 by producing large quantities of IL-1 and IL-6 or interleukins. Conclusion(s): Vitamin D deficiency is a potential link between respiratory infection and immune eva-sion, and vitamin D is a pleiotropic factor known to modulate the immune response against the patho-gen. Copyright © 2023 Bentham Science Publishers.
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Reminiscence therapy (RT) is a multi-sensory treatment that uses a combination of sight, touch, taste, smell and sound to help persons with dementia (PWD) remember events, people and places from their past lives. Currently, digital technologies such as mobile applications and immersive solutions including virtual and augmented reality, are gaining momentum as supplementary tools for RT. This paper presents a usability study of a web-based and virtual reality application to understand the limitations and opportunities of digital platforms for facilitating engaging experiences for PWD towards recalling memories, while easing the therapy process for the caregivers. A total of ten healthcare caregivers were recruited from the Geriatric Dementia Unit and Geriatric Transitional Unit in Ontario Shores Center for Mental Health Sciences, Ontario Canada. Usability feedback from the caregivers were collected from the interviews after the completion of the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. Institutional caregivers found both web-based and virtual reality (VRRT) usable with SUS score above average (68/100), but required improvements related to the onboarding training of caregivers. The interview revealed four overarching themes related to the VRRT: (1) Ease of use;(2) Positive impact on caregiving;(3) Potential of reduction in responsive behaviors;(4) Feasibility for promoting social connection during COVID-19 pandemic. Next steps will focus on improving the user experience and expanding the application for immersive VR supporting head-mounted displays, hand tracking, and physiological measures, as well as conducting an usability study with PWD to expand our understanding of using RT digital tools with various levels of immersion.
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“This book is an extraordinary source of information for analysis of various biomarkers in diseases due to infections. The book includes various methods for detection of infectious diseases in humans and other organisms. Of these methods, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), and recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) are noteworthy. There is clear description of each method about different strengths and weaknesses and that varies by sensitivity, specificity, and rapidity. These techniques can be used for the detection of pathogens like SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, influenza, lymphocystis disease virus, swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, swine vesicular disease virus, classical swine fever virus, infectious bursal disease virus, Marek’s disease virus, human papillomaviruses, infectious bronchitis virus, Newcastle disease virus, sacbrood virus, beak and feather disease virus, foot-and-mouth disease virus, bovine herpesvirus-1, and more. It is also possible to diagnose molecular marks of cancer, identification of genetically modified organisms, and detection of food adulteration. The book would be highly useful for health professional and researchers.” – Professor Dr. Ram B Singh,MBBS, MD(Int.Medi-Cardiol), DTNH, Certified Nutrition Specialist(USA), Halberg Hospital and Research Institute, Civil Lines, India. © 2022 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
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Disinfection robots, which replace human efforts to disinfect the environment, are becoming popular due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19. To address the existing problems of imperfect and costly automatic charging systems for disinfection robots, this paper designs an automatic charging system for disinfection robots based on structure-Aware semantic mapping, which optimizes the automatic charging scheme for robots and integrates LIDAR and infrared modules to achieve the goal. Firstly, the data is associated with the charging pile's priori information through structure perception, and the identified semantic information is mapped into the local map of the robot SLAM. Then the infrared module is used to adjust the position of the charging port to align with the charging pile, and TOF laser distance measuring function is also added to avoid damage to the charging pile from the disinfection robot. In 50 times of simulation experiments, our proposed automatic charging system achieves an accurate alignment rate of 96%. © 2022 IEEE.
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The global pandemic of COVID-19 caused by the novel coronavirus (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, SARS-CoV-2) has a huge impact on human health and socioeconomic development. Thus, inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 is a big concern for environmental public health and sanitary security. The virus will not be inactivated immediately after leave the host, leading to extended transmission routes. Water is an important medium for SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially the urban domestic sewage and medical wastewater. The surface functional protein and nucleic acid (RNA) are the main components of SARS-CoV-2, which can be attacked and destroyed by reactive species such as oxidative radicals, leading to inactivation of virus. The photocatalysis technology using nanomaterials can efficiently produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) under light irradiation. Therefore, by the attack of ROS, the structural protein of virus can be destroyed, the RNA can be damaged to inhibit its biological development, or its binding process to the host can be blocked. In this study, the environmental distribution and transmission characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 are presented firstly. Then, the mechanisms of photocatalysis by using nanomaterials and its application on SARS-CoV-2 inactivation are illustrated. The research progress on inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 through nanomaterial photocatalysis is comprehensively summarized, and the promising photocatalysts that can be used for SARS-CoV-2 inactivation are also proposed. This study can provide guidance for the development of photocatalytic nanomaterials for the inactivation of SARS-CoV-2, and has great significance for epidemic prevention and control, especially for cutting off the transmission route of virus in water. © 2022 Cailiao Daobaoshe/ Materials Review. All rights reserved.
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Background Two community hubs are currently located in Durham Region, Ontario, Canada, to provide a single point of access to a wide range of support services for individuals experiencing homelessness and other at-risk populations. The community hub in Oshawa is formally known as the Back Door Mission for the Relief of Poverty and the community hub in Ajax is formally known as the Ajax Hygiene Hub. It is unclear if these two community hubs are effective in addressing the needs of individuals experiencing homelessness and how the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact these services amongst this population. This study was conducted to identify gaps and barriers within the community hub models as well as provide recommendations to improve the coordination and delivery of services serving individuals experiencing homelessness and other at-risk populations. Methods A mixed methods approach was utilized in this study, which included surveys for individuals experiencing homelessness, through open-ended and close-ended questions to assess their experiences at either one of the two community hubs. A total of 75 surveys were completed by the study participants (40 surveys in Oshawa and 35 in Ajax). Thematic analysis was performed for all the open-ended survey responses. A literature review was also conducted to evaluate the community hub models as well as best practices for the implementation locally, nationally, and internationally. Results Data analysis for the open-ended survey responses revealed the need for housing support, increased resources for medical services, and the expansion of programs provided by the community hubs. Conclusions Homelessness is a major public health issue however community hubs play a pivotal role in addressing this concern in Durham Region. The equitable access to a diverse range of services that are co-located in a community hub is imperative for individuals experiencing homelessness, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Key messages The needs of homeless populations, program outcomes, service gaps, partnership collaboration, and best practices were explored to help inform the development of new community hubs in Durham Region. Study highlighted the effectiveness of community hubs in addressing the needs of homeless populations, whether it should become a permanent solution, and be developed in Durham Region and beyond.
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Designing a senior-level course that involves problem-based learning, including project completion task, is laborious and challenging. A well-designed project motivates the students to be self-learners and prepares them for future industrial or academic endeavors. The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges when instructions were forced to move either online or to a remote teaching/learning environment. Due to this rapid transition, delivery modes in teaching and learning modalities faced disruption making course design more difficult. The senior level Flight Controls course AME - 4513 is designed with Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) related projects for the students to have a better understanding of UAS usage on various applications in support of Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program. The purpose of this paper is to present the UAS lab modules in a junior level robotics lab, AME - 4802, which preceded the Flight Controls course in the school of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Successfully completing the course project requires independent research and involves numerical simulations of UAS. The Robotics Lab course focuses on hands-on projects of robotic systems with an emphasis on semi-autonomous mobile robots, including an UAS introduction module. • The UAS module in the Robotics Lab class is introduced in Spring 2020. Therefore, most of the students enrolled in the Spring 2020 Robotics Lab course have introductory knowledge about the UAS system when taking the Fall 2020 Flight Control course. In addition, Spring 2020 Robotics Lab was affected due to COVID-19. • The UAS module was not introduced in 2019 Spring Robotics lab. Thus, the students enrolled in Fall 2019 Flight Controls course did not have prior knowledge on the UAS system. • We thus present the implementation of UAS module in a junior level robotics lab which preceded the senior level Flight Controls course in following Fall semester, when the same instructor taught the course. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
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Quarantine and isolation are effective means to prevent transmission of COVID-19, but the problems arised during the period of quarantine and isolation are worth pondering. This article first streamlines five types of problems during the recent period of quarantine and isolation. Based on a brief review of related research on domestic and international literature, the article argues that it will be a suitable approach to carry out research from the perspective of spatial organization combined with the concept of systems theory. Then, it explores the reasons of the aforementioned problems from the objective laws of spatial organization and systems theory. It points out that the lack of systematical consideration of quarantine and isolation decisions in theory and the absence of preparations for switching from normal to abnormal status in practice are the fundamental reasons. Finally, three policy suggestions have been proposed from the perspectives of the optimization of spatial organization system, the enhancement of infrastructure and capabilities, and the backup mechanism and drills. © 2022, Science Press. All rights reserved.
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Background: Access to health care including clinical trials (CT) leading to paradigm-changing cancer treatments are critical for high quality cancer care and equity in society. In this report, we highlight methods in accruing to ETCTN wherein underrepresented rural, low-income, and racial minorities comprise >50% of enrollment. Methods: University of Kansas Cancer Center (KUCC) is one of eight National Cancer Institute (NCI) designated cancer centers awarded CATCH-UP.2020 (CATCH-UP), a congressionally mandated P30 supplement to enhance access for minority/underserved populations to ETCTN precision medicine CT. KUCC catchment area is 23% rural by Rural Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC);almost 90 % of counties are designated primary care HPSA's (Health Professional Shortage Areas). KUCC Early Phase and Masonic Cancer Alliance (rural outreach network) partnered to operationalize CATCH-UP. We engaged disease-focused champion investigators in disease working groups and MCA physicians who selected scientifically sound CT that fit catchment area needs. Patient and Investigator Voices Organizing Together, a patient research advocacy group provided practical feedback. MCA navigator coordinated recruitment. Telehealth was used for rural patients that would have a significant distance to travel just to be screened. Results: CATCH-UP was initiated in September 2020. Twenty-eight CT were activated, many in community sites. Average activation time was 81 days. Delays were mainly from CT amendments. KUCC enrolled the first patient in the CATCH-UP program. In 6 months, we met accrual requirements (24/year, 50% minorities). During first year, we enrolled 47 (>50% minorities), an increase of 680% from our average accrual of 6/year (>50% minorities) in ETCTN through Early Drug Development Opportunity Program (2016-2020). To date, we have enrolled 61, 54% from rural, HPSA, race and other minorities. Although the proportion of minorities did not change but remained high, this funding allowed us to substantially increase the number of patients from a catchment area with high proportion of geographically and socioeconomically underserved minorities given access to early phase CT through ETCTN. Conclusions: Amid COVID-19 pandemic, the NCI CATCH-UP program and methods we used allowed access to novel therapies for rural, medically underserved, and other minority groups.
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The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has become a public health emergency of international concern. Exposure to droplets produced in the coughs and sneezes of infected individuals has been perceived as the dominant transmission mode for COVID-19. However, increasingly more evidence supports claims of COVID-19 having airborne transmission. An in-depth understanding of the transmission pathways and influencing factors of SARS-CoV-2 is of great significance for formulating more effective intervention strategies. A large number of epidemiological investigations into the influence of atmospheric environmental conditions on virus transmission have been conducted. In this paper, we review current understandings of the association between COVID-19 and atmospheric environmental conditions. We first summarize the epidemiological investigations on the impact of atmospheric environmental factors (including solar radiation, temperature and humidity, wind speed, particulate matters, and gaseous pollutants) on the spread of COVID-19, and 164 epidemiological investigations are included, in which air temperature and relative humidity received the greatest attention. However, the impact of these factors on the prevalence of COVID-19 remains largely uncertain. 56% and 41% of investigations of temperature and humidity, respectively, show that cold and dry weather promotes COVID-19 transmission, while some studies come to the opposite conclusion, and still others do not show a significant relationship between them. Investigations of solar radiation are limited, but have come to the consistent conclusion that weak solar radiation is linked to increased severity of COVID-19 infection. Investigation of the impact of air pollution mainly focuses on particulate matters, and more than 70% of investigations indicate that PM2.5 likely contributes to the spread of COVID-19. Similarly, 62%, 51%, and 31% of investigations of NOx, O3, and SO2, respectively, indicate that the exposure to severe pollution can aggravate COVID-19 transmission. Therefore, the available findings reveal the complexity of the impact of atmospheric environmental conditions on the spread of COVID-19. We further discuss their mechanisms from three perspectives: (1) Atmospheric environmental conditions influence the generation of virus-laden aerosols and the occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 in the atmosphere. Relative humidity can affect the evaporation process of water on virus-laden aerosol, and thus affect its atmospheric life and probability of being inhaled by human body. (2) Atmospheric environmental conditions directly affect the stability of infection activity of SARS-CoV-2. Generally, high temperature, medium relative humidity, and intense solar radiation promote the inactivation of SARS-CoV-2. (3) Atmospheric environmental conditions indirectly affect the infection ability of SARS-CoV-2 by changing the defense ability of host cells. Air pollutants, especially PM2.5, can affect human susceptibility to the virus by increasing the expression of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor (angiotensin converting enzyme 2) in host cells. Meanwhile, meteorological conditions and air pollution can lead to respiratory system and other diseases in the human body, thus reducing human immunity and increasing the risk of virus infection, as well as the numbers of severely infected and fatal cases. All three mechanisms may contribute to the prevalence of COVID-19, but the dominant mechanism remains unclear. Finally, future directions of in-depth studies regarding the association between the epidemic and atmospheric conditions are proposed. © 2022 Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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It is expected that the field of language education will see an increased need for teachers to accept online teaching. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model, this study examined pre-service EFL teachers' acceptance of online teaching and the factors influencing them. The participants were TESOL majors at three universities in China. The data were collected from a questionnaire survey with 204 participants and semi-structured individual interviews with 12 participants. The study reveals that pre-service English teachers generally accept online teaching after completing one-semester of purely online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results also suggest that participants' enjoyable experiences in using online technologies, perceived usefulness of online teaching, social influences, and technological pedagogical content knowledge influence their acceptance of online teaching.
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We explore how information-sharing and financial inclusion influence bank risk in 84 countries from 1996-2020. Results show that greater information-sharing and financial inclusion lessen bank risk levels. The average bank's Z-score increases by 3.51 – 9.09%, attributable to enhanced information-sharing and higher financial inclusion. Inclusion-based deposit mobilization reduces bank probability of insolvency, suggesting that inclusion provides banks with cheap funding sources, reducing moral hazard problems and risky behaviors. Results remain robust across risk indicators and controlling for FinTech-based inclusion and COVID-19-induced risk. They support the hypothesis of increased social returns to transparency, information-sharing, and reaching out to financially excluded segments.