Novel Method for Estimating Time-Varying COVID-19 Transmission Rate

The transmission rate is an important indicator for characterizing a virus and estimating the risk of its outbreak in a certain area, but it is hard to measure. COVID-19, for instance, has greatly affected the world for more than 3 years since early 2020, but scholars have not yet found an effective method to obtain its timely transmission rate due to the fact that the value of COVID-19 transmission rate is not constant but dynamic, always changing over time and places. Therefore, in order to estimate the timely dynamic transmission rate of COVID-19, we performed the following: first, we utilized a rolling time series to construct a time-varying transmission rate model and, based on the model, managed to obtain the dynamic value of COVID-19 transmission rate in mainland China;second, to verify the result, we used the obtained COVID-19 transmission rate as the explanatory variable to conduct empirical research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on China's stock markets. Eventually, the result revealed that the COVID-19 transmission rate had a significant negative impact on China's stock markets, which, to some extent, confirms the validity of the used measurement method in this paper. Notably, the model constructed in this paper, combined with local conditions, can not only be used to estimate the COVID-19 transmission rate in mainland China but also in other affected countries or regions and would be applicable to calculate the transmission rate of other pathogens, not limited to COVID-19, which coincidently fills the gaps in the research. Furthermore, the research based on this model might play a part in regulating anti-pandemic governmental policies and could also help investors and stakeholders to make decisions in a pandemic setting.

A review on the identification of COVID-19, SARS and MERS.

COVID-19 is a global pandemic, which is the third outbreak and epidemic of infectious disease caused by coronavirus in this century and constitutes a major threat to human health.In this paper, COCOVID-19, Severeacute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory syndrome (MERS) were analyzed to distinguish their clinical features, diagnosis, prognosis and prevention, so as to better prevent and treat related diseases.Copyright © 2020 Chinese Medical Association

A review on the identification of COVID-19, SARS and MERS.

COVID-19 is a global pandemic, which is the third outbreak and epidemic of infectious disease caused by coronavirus in this century and constitutes a major threat to human health.In this paper, COCOVID-19, Severeacute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory syndrome (MERS) were analyzed to distinguish their clinical features, diagnosis, prognosis and prevention, so as to better prevent and treat related diseases.Copyright © 2020 Chinese Medical Association

A review on the identification of COVID-19, SARS and MERS.

COVID-19 is a global pandemic, which is the third outbreak and epidemic of infectious disease caused by coronavirus in this century and constitutes a major threat to human health.In this paper, COCOVID-19, Severeacute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory syndrome (MERS) were analyzed to distinguish their clinical features, diagnosis, prognosis and prevention, so as to better prevent and treat related diseases.Copyright © 2020 Chinese Medical Association

Fiscal transparency practice, challenges, and possible solutions: lessons from Covid 19

IMPACT: The extraordinarily fast-paced growth in government spending during Covid 19 highlights the need for effective measures to ensure fiscal transparency during emergencies. Governments must improve emergency fiscal transparency by disclosing more detailed information on the types and conditions of funding sources, extra- and off-budget revenue sources, and recipients and impacts of spending. Institutional procedures should be established to safeguard fiscal transparency during emergencies, and to increase the effective involvement of legislatures, auditing agencies, and citizens in the management of fiscal rescue packages. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Integrating CRISPR and isothermal amplification reactions in single-tubes for ultrasensitive detection of nucleic acids: the SARS-CoV-2 RNA example

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR-Cas) systems have advanced rapidly for the detection of nucleic acids and molecular diagnoses. The sensitivity of techniques directly using CRISPR-Cas systems for target recognition and signal generation is limited by the kinetics of trans-cleavage. Thus, CRISPR-Cas systems have been coupled with isothermal amplification techniques. One strategy for integrating CRISPR-Cas and amplification reactions into a single-tube is to place reagents in separate locations within the tube, maintaining optimum conditions for each reaction. A more challenging strategy is to mix all reagents and allow nucleic acid amplification and CRISPR-based detection to proceed in a homogeneous solution. This desirable approach requires substantial understanding of the compatibility of enzymatic reactions, systematic optimization, and appropriate adjustments of the integrated reactions to ensure high sensitivity. Ultrasensitive techniques have been developed for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in single-tubes. In this review, we highlight the principle, research needs, and challenges of ultrasensitive single-tube RNA detection using CRISPR technology. We stress the importance of understanding the kinetics of trans-cleavage activity of CRISPR-Cas systems. © 2022 Scientia Sinica Chimica. All rights reserved.

Masked Facial Region Recognition Using Human Pose Estimation and Broad Learning System

COVID-19 and its variants have been posing a large risk to people around the world since the outbreak of the disease. Many techniques like AI are explored to help combat epidemics. People are required or forced to wear a mask to fight against COVID-19 epidemics worldwide. It brings new challenges to the task of masked facial region recognition. When facial regions are occluded by masks, it will result in some failures of face detection algorithms. In this paper, we propose a method to recognize masked faces. It mainly includes three parts. Firstly, the human pose is estimated to produce a series of key points. It is implemented by OpenPose. Secondly, a key-points location strategy is designed to capture the masked facial regions. It can locate the positions of faces accurately. Thirdly, the broad learning system, which is also an incremental learning algorithm, is employed to recognize the classes of candidate regions. Experiments conducted on some datasets shed light on the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2022 SPIE.

AI in health tourism: developing a measurement scale

The COVID-19 pandemic created a strong urgency for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the tourism and hospitality industry. This paper was set to develop a scale of AI needs in health tourism. A total of 556 valid data were collected, and both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were employed to analyze the data. Six constructs containing 18 items were identified, and the reliability and validity were examined to reach satisfactory levels. The measurement scale developed may serve as a foundation for future research, and shed light on tourism managers, marketers, AI designers and policymakers.

Production Capacity Reserve Strategy of Emergency Medical Supplies: Incentive Model for Nonprofit Organizations

In 2020, COVID-19 swept across the globe. To reduce the social harms caused by this public health event, nonprofit organizations (NPOs) cooperated with medical enterprises to produce reserves of emergency medical supplies. In practice, this cooperation was challenged by the different goals of NPOs and medical enterprises and the asymmetry of information between these parties. Enterprises are prone to irregularities or speculative behaviors that can result in insufficient production capacity during public health events, which increase disaster risks. Based on the principal–agent relationship of NPOs and enterprises, this study analyzed a game model between NPOs and enterprises under information asymmetry;constructed an incentive model for reserve emergency medical supply production capacity;and solved the optimal reward and punishment coefficients of NPOs, optimal effort level of enterprises, and benefits of disaster reduction. The study also verified the validity of the model using numerical examples and a sensitivity analysis. In taking up the findings of the study, this paper discusses the effects of several important exogenous variables on the optimal decision strategies of NPOs and enterprises and offers management-related insights for NPOs. © 2022 by the authors.

Nexus between uncertainty, remittances, and households consumption: Evidence from dynamic SUR application

Household consumption induces aggregated economic activities by pushing market demand, capital accumulation and financial growth in the economy;on the other hand, instability in household consumption adversely affects the overall economic progress. Thus, exploring the key determinants responsible for household consumption instability is essential. The motivation of the study is to gauge the role of pandemic uncertainties and remittance inflow on household consumption in lower, Lower-middle, and Upper-Middle-income Countries for the period 1996 to 2020. The study employed several econometrical tools, including a panel cointegration test with the error correction term, dynamic SUR. The panel unit root test following CADF and CIPS documented variables are stationary after the first difference, and long-run associations are confirmed with the panel cointegration test. The coefficient of Dynamic Seemingly Unrelated Regression exposed pandemic uncertainties and has a negative impact on household consumption in all three-panel estimations;however, the coefficient of PUI is more prominent with COVID-19 effects. Remittances’ role in household consumption was positive and statistically significant, suggesting migrant remittances encourage additional consumption among households. On the policy aspect, the study proposed that the government should undertake macro policies to manage policy uncertainties so that the normal course of consumption level should not be interrupted because household consumption volatility creates discomfort in aggregated development. Moreover, efficient reallocation and remittance channels should be ensured in the economy;therefore, efficient institutional development has to be confirmed. Copyright © 2022 Yin, Qamruzzaman, Xiao, Mehta, Naqvi and Baig.

Dual-Factor WBAN Enhanced Authentication System Based on Iris and ECG Descriptors

At present, COVID-19 is still spreading and affecting millions of people worldwide. Minimizing the need for travel can significantly reduce the probability of infection and improve patients’quality of life. The wireless body area network (WBAN) transmits the patients’physiological data to the doctor remotely through the sensors in a way that minimizes physical contact with others. However, existing WBAN security authentication schemes have core limitation that includes weak authentication performance and over-consumption of resources that precludes their widespread adoption in practical applications. Therefore, in this paper, an enhanced dual-factor authentication system that address the mentioned drawbacks is proposed for securing WBAN resources. By combining iris and electrocardiogram (ECG) features, users would be required to pass the first-level iris authentication before performing the second-level ECG authentication, thus enhancing the overall security scheme of a WBAN system. Furthermore, we examined the existing Inter-Pulse-Intervals (IPI) encoding methods and propose a more efficient ECG IPI encoding algorithm which can effectively shorten the encoding time without affecting the overall encoding performance. Finally, extensive experiments were performed to verify the performance of the proposed dual-factor iris and ECG based WBAN authentication system using public iris and ECG databases. The experimental results show that the false acceptance rate (FAR) is close to 0.0% and the false rejection rate (FRR) is close to 3.2%. Findings from this study suggest that the proposed dual-factor authentication scheme could aid adequate deployment of security schemes to protect WBAN resources in practical applications. IEEE

Introduction of FDA's COVID-19: Master Protocols Evaluating Drugs and Biological Products for Treatment or Prevention Guidance

The emerging master protocol clinical research model has the advantages of accelerating drug development and shortening the development time, but it is also difficult. To solve the difficulties of sponsors of master protocols of drugs for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19, American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued COVID-19: Master Protocols Evaluating Drugs and Biological Products for Treatment or Prevention Guidance in May 2021. It has put forward many suggestions on the design, conduct, and statistics of the master rotocols of COVID-19 drugs. This paper introduces the FDA's guidance in detail. It is hoped that it will be helpful for China to carry out the research and supervision in this field, and also enlighten us to formulate similar guidance according to the national conditions. © 2021 Drug Evaluation Research. All Rights Reserved.

SAUNet plus plus : an automatic segmentation model of COVID-19 lesion from CT slices

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic has spread worldwide and the healthcare system is in crisis. Accurate, automated and rapid segmentation of COVID-19 lesion in computed tomography (CT) images can help doctors diagnose and provide prognostic information. However, the variety of lesions and small regions of early lesion complicate their segmentation. To solve these problems, we propose a new SAUNet++ model with squeeze excitation residual (SER) module and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module. The SER module can assign more weights to more important channels and mitigate the problem of gradient disappearance;the ASPP module can obtain context information by atrous convolution using various sampling rates. In addition, the generalized dice loss (GDL) can reduce the correlation between lesion size and dice loss, and is introduced to solve the problem of small regions segmentation of COVID-19 lesion. We collected multinational CT scan data from China, Italy and Russia and conducted extensive comparative and ablation studies. The experimental results demonstrated that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models and can effectively improve the accuracy of COVID-19 lesion segmentation on the dice similarity coefficient (our: 87.38% vs. U-Net++: 84.25%), sensitivity (our: 93.28% vs. U-Net++: 89.85%) and Hausdorff distance (our: 19.99 mm vs. U-Net++: 26.79 mm), respectively.

An Adaptive Neurofeedback Method for Attention Regulation Based on the Internet of Things

The rapid development of the COVID-19 pandemic has threatened the lives of people around the world. Many people were caught in anxiety and panic, which also prevents people from fully concentrating on their normal lives. However, the current common neurofeedback therapies used to solve the problem of lack of attention cannot fully deal with the differences in each individual. In addition, direct contact between the patient and the doctor also increases the risk of virus transmission during treatment. This article combines neurofeedback and IoT to establish an adaptive attention adjustment method. IoT connects patients and doctors remotely, reducing the direct contact between them. In order to adapt to individual differences, the feedback indicators of each individual are individually calibrated. In addition, the proportional, integral, and derivative controller was used to adjust the difficulty of the feedback task to adapt to each individual's self-regulation ability and provide the individual with a higher level of regulation. We also designed adaptive attention adjustment experiments for different individuals. The results show that through adaptive feedback training, the individual's feedback indicator has dropped by 77.90%, and the individual can adjust his attention state to the individual's optimal baseline threshold, and the oscillation error gradually reduces to the expected threshold range. This method can cope with the differences between different individuals and provide each individual with the same level of feedback regulation. In the future, this study may provide a general adjuvant treatment for other mental illnesses.

[Research progress on the wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) in SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and early warning system from a community health perspective].

The continuously spreading of SARS-CoV-2 poses a threat not only to public health but also to all aspects of socio-economics. Current public health measures are costly and have potential health risks, thus, it is imminent that developing efficient and economical early warning surreillance tools from a public health perspective. In this review, we summarized the current COVID-19 epidemiological surveillance measures and the efficiency, economic, and cutting edge of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). The WBE-based surveillance is organized and reviewed from three aspects: early warning system for the timing of epidemic, routine epidemic surveillance, and parameters determination of predicting epidemiological models of COVID-19. It reveals the application value of WBE as an early warning and surveillance system of public health, and then, discussing its current weakness and strength, adding literature for a WBE-based surveillance system for COVID-19 epidemic in China.

Documentation of goals of care (GOC) by medical oncologists is associated with improved oncology patient end-of-life (EOL) care outcomes

Background: Documenting GOC is integral to patient care and quality performance but has been underutilized by oncologists due to many barriers. As oncologists play a key role in initiating GOC discussions, we implemented a clinical initiative to improve their GOC documentation and evaluated the impact of such documentation on patient care during the EOL (last 30 days of life). Methods: We launched the initiative among 270 medical oncologists in an academic cancer center in 4/2020. A newly formulated GOC note to ease documentation was embedded in oncology outpatient and inpatient notes. Oncologists completed components in the GOC note that applied to their communication about GOC with the patient: 1) cancer natural history, 2) patient goals, and 3) EOL discussion: patient resuscitation preferences and, when pertinent, receptivity to hospice referral. GOC notes were pulled to a centralized location in the electronic health record (EHR) that displays documents relevant to patients' values, goals and preferences. A dashboard allowed continual monitoring of documentation performance. We evaluated the association between GOC notes and outcomes of patient care at EOL. We further analyzed the impact of EOL discussion on EOL care. Results: The GOC note completion rate steadily rose after implementation. GOC notes were present in EHR for 46% of 10,006 patients who were either seen in outpatient clinic or discharged from hospital during the 1 week of January 2021. Among 1790 patients who died between 7/1/20 and 12/31/20 and had either at least an outpatient visit or hospitalization during EOL, the median days from first GOC note and first EOL discussion to the patient's death were 71 days and 24 days, respectively. Linear regression analysis demonstrated that patients who had GOC note 60 days before death spent less time as inpatient during EOL (0.4 day less/patient, from 8.1 to 7.7, P = 0.01). When EOL discussion was documented 30 days before death, patients also spent less time in the hospital (1.2 days less/patient, from 9.7 to 8.5, P < 0.001) and in the ICU (0.3 days less/patient, from 1.7 to 1.4 ICU days, P = 0.04), and were 4% less likely to receive chemotherapy (from 38% to 34%, P = 0.004) at EOL. During the same period, among 1,009 patients with hospital admission in the last 30 days of life, those with a prior documented EOL discussion had shorter inpatient stay (7.7 vs 13.1 days, P < 0.001) and were more likely to be discharged to hospice (34% vs 22%, P = 0.003). Conclusions: During the COVID-19 pandemic, we successfully implemented GOC documentation by medical oncologists that is easily visible by the full care team. Documentation of GOC including EOL discussion was associated with fewer days in the hospital and ICU, increased hospice referral, and lower likelihood of receiving chemotherapy during patients' last 30 days of life.

Drug Repurposing for COVID-19 Treatment by Integrating Network Pharmacology and Transcriptomics

Since coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a serious new worldwide public health crisis with significant morbidity and mortality, effective therapeutic treatments are urgently needed. Drug repurposing is an efficient and cost-effective strategy with minimum risk for identifying novel potential treatment options by repositioning therapies that were previously approved for other clinical outcomes. Here, we used an integrated network-based pharmacologic and transcriptomic approach to screen drug candidates novel for COVID-19 treatment. Network-based proximity scores were calculated to identify the drug-disease pharmacological effect between drug-target relationship modules and COVID-19 related genes. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was then performed to determine whether drug candidates influence the expression of COVID-19 related genes and examine the sensitivity of the repurposing drug treatment to peripheral immune cell types. Moreover, we used the complementary exposure model to recommend potential synergistic drug combinations. We identified 18 individual drug candidates including nicardipine, orantinib, tipifarnib and promethazine which have not previously been proposed as possible treatments for COVID-19. Additionally, 30 synergistic drug pairs were ultimately recommended including fostamatinib plus tretinoin and orantinib plus valproic acid. Differential expression genes of most repurposing drugs were enriched significantly in B cells. The findings may potentially accelerate the discovery and establishment of an effective therapeutic treatment plan for COVID-19 patients.

A review on the identification of COVID-19, SARS and MERS

COVID-19 is a global pandemic, which is the third outbreak and epidemic of infectious disease caused by coronavirus in this century and constitutes a major threat to human health.In this paper, COCOVID-19, Severeacute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory syndrome (MERS) were analyzed to distinguish their clinical features, diagnosis, prognosis and prevention, so as to better prevent and treat related diseases. © 2020 Chinese Medical Association

[Hypoxia and inflammation are risk factors for acute myocardial injury in patients with coronavirus disease 2019]

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the risk factors for acute myocardial injury in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. METHODS: This is a retrospective analysis of a COVID-19 cohort, in which 149 confirmed COVID-19 patients enrolled were divided into the group of myocardial injury (19 cases) and the group of non-myocardial injury (130 cases). Myocardial injury was defined according to Fourth universal definition of myocardial infarction released by European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in 2018, that cardiac troponin (cTn) was above 99th percentile of the reference level. Clinical information and results of laboratory tests of the eligible patients were collected. Factors associated with myocardial injury in COVID-19 patients were evaluated. RESULTS: Compared with the group of non-injury, the patients in the group of injury were older and had a larger proportion of severe or critical cases (P < 0.05), higher respiratory rate and lower percutaneous oxygen saturation (SpO(2)) without oxygen therapy on admission (P < 0.05). All inflammatory indexes except for tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) showed significant elevation in the patients of the group of injury (P < 0.05). Analyzed by Spearman correlation test, we showed that the levels of circulatory cTnI were in positive correlation with the levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), ferritin, receptor of interleukin-2 (IL-2R), interleukin-6 (IL-6) and interleukin-8 (IL-8) (ρ > 0, P < 0.05). Lower SpO(2) without oxygen therapy on admission (OR: 0.860, 95%CI: 0.779-0.949, P=0.003) and higher plasma IL-6 levels (OR: 1.068, 95%CI: 1.019-1.120, P=0.006) were independent risk factors for acute myocardial injury in the patients with COVID-19 by multivariate Logistic regression analyses. CONCLUSION: Hypoxic state and inflammation may play a key role in the pathogenesis of acute myocardial injury in COVID-19 patients.