ABSTRACT
Introduction: The prevalence of various infectious diseases has been changing since the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Hepatitis A (HA) is transmitted from food and drink contaminated with the hepatitis A virus, while hepatitis E (HE) is a known zoonotic disease. The trends of HA and HE infection during the COVID-19 pandemic are unknown in Japan. Objective(s): In this study, we investigated the incidence of HA and HE before and after the COVID-19 epidemic, and compared the differences in trends between our hospital and Japanese statistics. Method(s): We investigated the number of IgA-HEV and IgM-HAV antibodies tested and positive at our hospital between January 2015 and December 2021. We verified the patient background, blood test findings and outcome of each antibody-positive. Result(s): The number of HE diagnoses /tests (rate) was 2 /187 (1.1%) in 2015, 2 /155 (1.3%) in 2016, 7 /236 (3.0%) in 2017, 11 /234 (4.7%) in 2018 and 15/ 307 (4.9%) in 2019, which was an increasing trend, but the number of tests remained the same but the number of diagnoses decreased 6 /314 (1.9%) in 2020, 2 /296 (1.0%) in 2021. According to Japanese statistics, the number of HE diagnoses showed a gradual increase from 213 in 2015 to 490 in 2019, but a slight decrease was reported in 441 in 2020 and 447 cases in 2021, respectively. On the other hand, there was no marked change in the number of HA diagnoses/tests between 2015 and 2019. 7 cases of HIV co-infection and an epidemic among Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) were observed in 2018. The number of cases decreased markedly to 0 /362 (0%) in 2020 and 0 /339 (0%) in 2021. In Japan, the number of HA diagnoses was in the 200 s from 2015 to 2017, while 925 cases were diagnosed in 2018 and 425 cases in 2019, indicating an epidemic, but the number of HA diagnoses has decreased significantly to 118 in 2020 and 69 in 2021. Conclusion(s): The number of cases of HE, a zoonosis, was reported to have decreased slightly nationwide, even with the coronary disaster, but the number of cases decreased markedly at our facility in Tokyo, suggesting the influence of changes in the lifestyle and activity patterns of the patient population. On the other hand, the number of cases of HA, which had been prevalent in recent years as a result of sexual contact among MSM, has decreased, probably due to a decrease in the influx of cases from overseas as a result of travel restrictions.
ABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is still prevalent in the world. Social distancing is more important during exercise because we may not be able to wear masks to avoid breathing problems, heatstroke, etc. For supporting management of social distancing, we are developing a human localization system using a single camera especially for sports schools and gyms. We rely on a single camera because of the deployment cost. The system recognizes people from a video and estimates the human positions for supporting management of social distancing. The challenge is the error owing to pose variation during sports. In order to solve the problem, we adjust the height of the waist according to the pose of the legs. For evaluation, we collected 80 images with 5 kinds of poses. The results show that we successfully reduce the absolute position error by 23 cm on average. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.
ABSTRACT
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is still prevalent in the world. Exercise is important to maintain our health while dealing with infectious diseases. Social distancing is more important during exercise because we may not be able to wear masks to avoid breathing problems, heatstroke, etc. To maintain social distancing during exercise, we develop a close-contact detection system using a single camera especially for sports in schools and gyms. We rely on a single camera because of the deployment cost. The system recognizes people from a video and estimates the interpersonal distance for close-contact detection. The challenge is the occlusion of people, which leads to false negatives in close-contact detection. To solve the problem, we leverage the observation that most false negatives in human detection are caused by occlusion owing to other people. This is because there are few obstacles in sports facilities. Based on the above observation, we assume that a person still exists near the last detected position even when s/he disappears in the proximity of other people. For evaluation, we recorded 834 videos that were 112 min long in total including various scenarios with 2724 close-contacts. The results show that the F1-score of close-contact detection and tracking are 83.6% and 67.3%, respectively. We also confirmed that the start and end time errors are within 1 s for more than 80% of the close-contacts. © 2013 IEEE.