ABSTRACT
Purpose : To explore associations between sensory impairment (vision and/or hearing) and Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the adult 2020 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) population. Methods : A cross-sectional study was conducted using the 2020 CHIS, the nation's largest state health survey with a sample representative of the population of California. The exposure of interest was having sensory impairment, defined as answering “Yes” to the question, “Are you blind or deaf, or do you have a severe vision or hearing problem?” The outcome of interest was whether a health professional suspected the respondent had COVID-19, assessed among those adults who had or thought they had COVID-19 and contacted a health professional. Logistic regression models were constructed to determine the odds of suspected COVID-19 by sensory impairment status, controlling for the following covariates: age, sex, race/ethnicity, self-reported general health status, current smoking habits, overweight/obese body mass index, and current health insurance status. All analyses were weighted according to the CHIS sampling design. Results : A total of 21,949 sampled participants were included, representing a weighted estimate of 29,684,882 individuals. The weighted prevalence of sensory impairment was 5.9% (95% confidence interval [CI] 5.4-6.4%). Approximately 10.9% (95% CI: 10.3-11.6%) of all participants had or thought they had COVID-19, 4.9% (95% CI: 4.5-5.3%) contacted a health professional about COVID-19 concerns, and 1.7% (95% CI: 1.4-2.0%) were suspected of having COVID-19 by a health professional. Regression analyses were performed in a subgroup of 988 participants representing 1,431,690 individuals who had or thought they had COVID-19 and contacted a health professional. Those with sensory impairment had 2.12 times the unadjusted odds of suspected COVID-19 compared to those without sensory impairment (odds ratio [OR]: 2.12, 95% CI: 0.98-4.63). Those with sensory impairment had 2.51 times the adjusted odds of suspected COVID-19 compared to those without sensory impairment (adjusted OR: 2.51, 95% CI: 1.03-6.10). Conclusions : In the 2020 CHIS adult population, individuals with vision and/or hearing impairment had greater odds of having COVID-19 suspected by a health professional. Additional studies are necessary to triangulate these findings and further explore this possible increased risk for COVID-19 in this vulnerable population.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused serious damage to the health, life and, economic stability of human beings all over the world. In order to combat this disease, researchers from all over the world, including computer scientists, are beginning to engage in cross-regional cooperation to conduct research on SARS-CoV-2. One of the latest reports pointed out that the sequence deletion of the specific region of the SARS-CoV-2 genomic is related to its viral infectivity. In addition, the sequence deletion of this specific region is also found in Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), and Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Through next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, the sequence data of biological genomes can be quickly obtained, but the number of short reads generated by NGS is often as high as one million big data. It is a challenge to detect the information necessary to provide the exact sequence deletion breakpoint from these NGS data, especially in the sequence data of highly variable viral genomes. In our previous research, we proposed VirDelect, a bioinformatics tool that can detect exact breakpoints in Viral NGS data. In this paper, a new method, One-base Alignment Plus (OAP), is proposed to enhance further the core VirDelect algorithm, in order to improve the sequence deletion detection correctness. We use the simulated data of SARS-CoV-2 and HBV with different deletion lengths and the real data of HBV to conduct experiments and evaluate the correctness. The experimental results showed that VirDelect+OAP was able to find deletions that VirDelect could not find in the simulation data, and in the real data, the correctness of VirDelect+OPA was raised effectively. © 2020 IEEE.