ABSTRACT
Due to the threat of COVID-19 pandemic, personal protection equipment (PPE) has raised lots of attentions to protect people from infection. This unprecedented virus can be spread through airborne, respiratory droplets and social contact. Although there are some devices and PPEs for people who are conscious and able to obey the social distance policy, to protect infants is still challenging. Baby is one of the vulnerable groups to the disease but there is no appropriate PPE when baby needs to be exposed to irresistible events like visiting a hospital, receiving vaccination or being accompanied by parents who come home from work). In this study, a concept of smart baby protective tent is developed. The simple hardware offers a quick assembly using PVC pipes, 3D-printed joints and a transparent cover sheet to create an independent and safe space from direct and indirect infection through breathing or saliva. With two additional parts, the smart baby protective tent can thereby provide clear air circulation and modern care. A fan system equipped with a clamp for a disposable medical-certified mask is applied to supply clean and circulated air for the babies. Functional sensors are attached to detect essential signals like body temperature, environment temperature, humidity, vibration, brightness, sound, CO2, and PM 2.5. These received signals are processed via a micro-controller and can be uploaded to personal social media in order to increase caregivers' awareness of the babies' situation inside the tent.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 sparked a paradigm shift for businesses, education, and social life. The measures taken have emphasized, more than ever, the importance of on-line communication platforms. Online streaming services, education tools, and workplace communication tools all experienced a multifold increase in demand in 2020 as the world population was under a lockdown. Service providers' ability to meet these demands relies on the capacity of mega-scale data centers (MSDC). Hence, capacity and bandwidth of MSDCs are expected to grow exponentially. The transition from 12.8 to 51.2Tb/s switches for data centers leaf and spine is underway, and is expected to deploy starting in 2021\sim 2022 [1]. Unfortunately, the increase of switch throughput comes with serious area, yield, and power limitations. To mitigate the problem, recent advances in chiplets and multi-die technologies for high throughput switches show a promising increase in yield and lower solution cost. Another direction is silicon photonic and ASIC co-integration, which allows for package throughput well beyond the electrical interface capability. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in a global pandemic, and there is limited data on effective therapies. Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, a live-attenuated strain derived from an isolate of Mycobacterium bovis and originally designed to prevent tuberculosis, has shown some efficacy against infection with unrelated pathogens. In this study, we reviewed 120 consecutive adult patients (≥18 years old) with COVID-19 at a major federally qualified health centre in Rhode Island, United States from 19 March to 29 April 2020. Median age was 39.5 years (interquartile range, 27.0-50.0), 30% were male and 87.5% were Latino/Hispanics. Eighty-two (68.3%) patients had BCG vaccination. Individuals with BCG vaccination were less likely to require hospital admission during the disease course (3.7% vs. 15.8%, P = 0.019). This association remained unchanged after adjusting for demographics and comorbidities (P = 0.017) using multivariate regression analysis. The finding from our study suggests the potential of BCG in preventing more severe COVID-19.