Assessment of Subjective Well-Being in a Cohort of University Students and Staff Members: Association with Physical Activity and Outdoor Leisure Time during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Time spent outdoors and physical activity (PA) promote mental health. To confirm this relationship in the aftermath of COVID-19 lockdowns, we explored individual levels of anxiety, depression, stress and subjective well-being (SWB) in a cohort of academic students and staff members and tested their association with sport practice, PA at leisure time and time spent outdoors. Our cross-sectional study collected data during the COVID-19 outbreak (April-May 2021) on 939 students and on 238 employees, who completed an online survey on sociodemographic and lifestyle features, depression, anxiety, stress, and SWB. Results showed that the students exhibited higher levels of anxiety, depression, and stress, and lower levels of SWB (p < 0.001 for all domains) compared to the staff members. Correlation analysis confirmed that PA and time spent in nature were associated to high mental health scores among staff and, more consistently, among students. Finally, mediation analyses indicated that the time spent in nature, social relationships, and levels of energy play a mediator role in the relationship between sport practice and SWB. Our evidence reinforces the protective role of time spent in nature in improving mental health, and provides support for policymakers to make appropriate choices for a better management of COVID-19 pandemic consequences.

Codon usage, phylogeny and binding energy estimation predict the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

In the frames of a One Health strategy, i.e. a strategy should be able to predict susceptibility to infection in both humans and animals, developing a SARS-CoV-2 mutation tracking system is a goal. We observed that the phylogenetic proximity of vertebrate ACE2 receptors does not affect the binding energy for the viral spike protein. However, all viral variants seem to bind ACE2 better in many animals than in humans. Moreover, two observations highlight that the evolution of the virus started at the beginning of 2020 and culminated with the appearance of the variants. First, codon usage analysis shows that the B.1.1.7 (alpha), B.1.351 (beta) and B.1.617.2 (delta) variants, similar in the use of codons, are also similar to a virus sampled in January 2020. Second, the host-specific D614G mutation becomes prevalent starting from March 2020. Overall, we show that SARS-CoV-2 undergoes a process of molecular evolution that begins with the optimization of codons followed by the functional optimization of the spike protein.