Global Governance in the New Era: Concepts and Approaches

This book mainly introduces the concepts and approaches of global governance from the viewpoints of Chinese and Russian scholars and is divided into four parts. The first one deals with the concept of a new type of global governance, namely "Globalization 2.0". The second one is dedicated to institutions and multilateralism, including the importance and effectiveness of international institutions. The third part focuses on the important countries and regions in the new era, as well as such issues as the current global status quo, processes in Eurasia, the prospects of the U.S.-China-Russia trilateral relationship. The last part analyzes the future development of global governance and possible solutions of how it might be improved. Climate change, digital era, cyber security, financial and economic regimes, COVID-19 are all involved in this part. In short, this book is a profound and cutting-edge research on global governance. © China Social Sciences Press 2023.

Multitask Learning Neural Networks for Pandemic Prediction with Public Stance Enhancement

State and local governments have imposed health policies to contain the spread of COVID-19 since it had a serious impact on human daily life. However, the public stance on these measures may be time-varying. It is likely to escalate the infection in the area where the public is negative or resistant. To take advantage of the correlation between public stance on health policies and the COVID-19 statistics, we propose a novel framework, Multitask Learning Neural Networks for Pandemic Prediction with Public Stance Enhancement (MP3), which is composed of three modules: (1) Stance awareness module to make stance detection on health policies from users' tweets in social media and convert them into a stance time series. (2) Temporal feature extraction module that applies Convolution Neural Network and Recurrent Neural Network to extract and fuse local patterns and long-term correlations from COVID-19 statistics. Moreover, a Stance Latency-aware Attention is proposed to capture dynamic social effects and fuse them with temporal features. (3) Multi-task prediction module to adopt Graph Convolution Network to model the spread of pandemic and employ multi-task learning to simultaneously predict COVID-19 statistics and the trend of public stance on health policies. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both confirmed cases and deaths prediction tasks. © 2022 IEEE.

Why Did China's Zero-COVID Policy Persist? Decision Urgency, Regime Type, and Political Opportunity Structures

Despite soaring social costs, opposed professional opinions, and divergent foreign experiences, China still persisted with its Zero-COVID policy. Preexisting theories of policy change are unable to explain the continuation of China's COVID policy. Corresponding to the three stages of policy making, implementation and adjustment, the authors propose a framework of three decision-making constraints: (1) decision urgency, (2) regime type, and (3) political opportunity structures, which are believed to jointly shape China's policy against Omicron and obstruct Chinese decision-makers from adjusting it. This intensive case study enriches understanding of China's COVID policy specifically and the policy process in China more generally. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

EpiGNN: Exploring Spatial Transmission with Graph Neural Network for Regional Epidemic Forecasting

Epidemic forecasting is the key to effective control of epidemic transmission and helps the world mitigate the crisis that threatens public health. To better understand the transmission and evolution of epidemics, we propose EpiGNN, a graph neural network-based model for epidemic forecasting. Specifically, we design a transmission risk encoding module to characterize local and global spatial effects of regions in epidemic processes and incorporate them into the model. Meanwhile, we develop a Region-Aware Graph Learner (RAGL) that takes transmission risk, geographical dependencies, and temporal information into account to better explore spatial-temporal dependencies and makes regions aware of related regions' epidemic situations. The RAGL can also combine with external resources, such as human mobility, to further improve prediction performance. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world epidemic-related datasets (including influenza and COVID-19) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and show that EpiGNN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 9.48% in RMSE. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Is the global supply chain hard to reverse? Understanding manufacturing strategies of Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean Firms

As the Covid pandemic underscores global supply chain risks, there is a debate on whether to bring US manufacturing back from overseas. This paper provides insights into the heated debate on the global supply chain by examining the competitive manufacturing environments of China, Japan, and South Korea. More specifically, we conduct a cross-national survey and empirically investigate the manufacturing strategies employed by manufacturing managers in the top Asian players: China, Japan, and South Korea. We examine four dimensions of the manufacturing strategies: quality, inventory, flexibility, and top management involvement. Our findings indicate that Japanese manufacturers are more committed to the cumulative approach to quality management and see enhanced flexibility as a strategic priority. While Chinese managers are also committed to achieving quality, they are more delivery-driven and thus are more likely to occasionally accept slightly off-quality components from suppliers to "save” an order. However, in all three countries, managers with a high focus on quality also focus on just-in-time management and in turn, on flexibility. There is significantly less agreement among Chinese managers, compared to their Japanese and Korean counterparts, that the top management should be involved in operational planning, goal setting, and the provision of rewards. © 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Working Conditions and Burnout of Special Educators of Students With EBD: Longitudinal Outcomes

Special education teacher (SET) burnout is a significant concern, especially for SETs serving students with emotional–behavioral disorders (EBD), as they tend to experience higher burnout than other teachers. Working conditions, especially social support, have the potential to ameliorate burnout, but prior research has not articulated the sources and types of social support that are most important. The authors conducted a longitudinal study, surveying 230 SETs serving students with EBD at three time points across one school year. Data revealed administrative support, adequacy of planning time, and autonomy in fall predicted emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment in winter and spring. Associations between working conditions and burnout components were partially mediated by SETs' perceptions of workload manageability. SET change in well-being due to COVID-19 during the early months of the pandemic was not associated with burnout. The authors discuss implications, limitations, and directions for future inquiry. © 2022 Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children.

Evolutionary Multiobjective Site Selection of Xi'an Medical Emergency Material Warehouse Based on Multiple Memetic Directions

Due to the lack of medical materials in some emergency public events, for example, the outbreak of COVID-19, it is urgent to establish a medical emergency material warehouse. Taking Xi'an, China, as an example, this study aims to select suitable sites of Xi'an medical emergency material warehouse. In this study, the problem of site selection models as a multiobjective optimization problem. The coverage function and comprehensive efficiency function are designed as two conflicting objectives. Then, a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on multiple memetic direction is proposed to optimize the two objectives concurrently. The crossover and mutation operators are designed for evolutionary multiobjective site selection. The proposed crossover operator is able to balance the global and local search abilities, and the proposed mutation operator fuses the distribution information of hospital location, service population, and the overall coverage. Experiments on real dataset verify the superiority of the proposed evolutionary multiobjective site selection method.

Spillover effects in Chinese carbon, energy and financial markets

As China's carbon market continues to develop, its close connection with the financial and energy markets is becoming increasingly apparent. A systematic study of the spillover effects between markets is important, as it can help prevent excessive fluctuations in carbon prices. With this in mind, this study proposes a time-varying parameter vector autoregression with Lanne-Nyberg decomposition extended joint connectedness approach to analyze quantitatively the spillover effects in the "carbon-energy-financial" system. Empirical results show that a bidirectional spillover effect exists among markets. Not only does the carbon market have the most pronounced return (volatility) linkages with the natural gas (clean energy) market, but the information connected with the energy markets is also more closely linked than with the financial markets. We also find that market fluctuations, caused by the China-US trade conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic, have increased spillovers in the system.

Study on Urban Travel Volume During the Outbreak of COVID-19

The distribution and change of travel intensity reflect the pattern of the city and the activity of trip population. It is important to understand the pattern of the city and the activity of trip flow for urban planning and government decision-making. This paper constructs a Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal model with three effects: space, time, and space-time, which uses the travel intensity data during the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Hubei province (2020.01.01–2020.05.02). With the help of Markoff’s Monte Carlo method, this paper analyzes the distribution and fluctuation of traffic flow in each city of Hubei province. The results show that the space-time model does not deteriorate compared with the main space model. The study found that nearly 41% of cities with a spatial effect higher than 1 were active during the epidemic in Hubei province and the time effect of travel intensity in Hubei province dropped rapidly from 2 to 0.5 after cities in Hubei province issued measures to close the cities one after another, which lasted nearly a month. Strict social distance intervention is one of the important reasons for Hubei province to control the epidemic effectively in a few months. At the same time, in the stability analysis of the city, we found that Wuhan belongs to an unstable area, which is unfavorable to the control of COVID-19. The research results provide a certain perspective for COVID-19 prevention and control: when there are confirmed patients in the province, we believe that the government should first pay attention to those cities with high spatial effect and instability. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Time map and predictors of on-spot emotional responses of Chinese people during COVID-19 outbreak: From January 27 to February 20, 2020

Background: The impact of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on people's mental health has been gradually revealed. Emotional responses under this pandemic have been a focus. This study aimed to observe the time map and predictors of transient daily emotions (on-spot emotional responses) during the COVID-19 outbreak in Chinese people. Methods: A total of 133,027 Chinese people from all cities and areas of China took part in this 25-day online investigation from January 27 to February 20, 2020. Hierarchical regression was carried out. Results: Chinese people reported mild positive and negative emotions during COVID-19, and the trend was that negative emotions declined and happy emotion increased in a curvilinear style. Females reported stronger on-spot negative emotions. Young and unmarried people, and individuals with lower risk perception reported lower negative emotions and higher happiness, while people with postgraduate or higher education, medical staff and patients, and individuals coming from areas with more confirmed cases, experienced stronger positive and negative emotions. In the regression model, risk predictors of negative emotions were being female, being older in age, having postgraduate or higher education, living in a city with more confirmed cases, being a patient or medical staff, and having higher risk perception, while protective predictors of negative emotions were being unmarried, having high-school or college education, and later investigating date. Notably, been married was negative predictor of happiness. Conclusions: This large sample, 25-day successive online investigation is among the first to reveal the time map of on-spot emotions in Chinese people under the COVID-19 pandemic. The risk and protective predictors of on-spot negative emotions help to recognize vulnerable people under pandemic conditions and further develop more targeted early interventions for future crises. © 2021 The Authors

Developing an online undergraduate small-group dermatology teaching programme during the COVID-19 pandemic

Medical school undergraduates across the country have faced widespread interruptions to their training during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our department provides regular teaching to up to 27 fourth-year medical students each term, with three students shadowing each week and learning through a mix of observing in clinic and case discussions. The COVID-19 pandemic meant many students left campus and returned home, with a sudden halt in their training, and many subjects to cover in their busy curriculum. Rather than leave gaps in their dermatology teaching, a quick solution was devised with the medical school. Together, a consultant and registrar devised a 6-week online teaching programme. This was held with 15 students due to rotate through dermatology for the remainder of the term and made optional. Students had the opportunity to sign in to a weekly 1-h session on Microsoft Teams, broken up into segments of didactic teaching, interactive sessions and multiple-choice questions. Week 1 comprised introductory terminology, and giving students a chance to practice describing lesions. Weeks 2-5 were loosely based on the medical school curriculum on dermatology, but students were encouraged to suggest topics they wanted to focus on, e.g. emergency dermatology. Week 6 aimed to consolidate skills by interactive case-based discussions. These were sent to the students in advance to prepare before the session. These case studies have already been shared with members of British Association of Undergraduate Teachers of Dermatology (BAUTOD). Eight of 15 students completed feedback at the end of placement, 100% of whom rated the course as excellent. The best-received parts were the interactive components and being able to dictate what topics to cover in more depth. The benefit of having two teachers throughout was the ability to create a more seminar-based atmosphere, and students felt comfortable to ask questions using the 'Chat' function. Students felt that there was good rapport and it formed a supportive network during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they were separated. The teaching session became available to more students across all year groups, but only the students due on pathway could contribute to the interactive component. The virtual aspect of the teaching meant that both the teachers and students were able to deliver and access it from anywhere, without having to be in the department. Following the success of the remote teaching course, the plan is to design a similar 9-week interactive, outcome-focused, case-based course and share this once again with members of BAUTOD.

Streamlining patient referrals and clearing the dermatology non-2-week-wait waiting list using trainee-led teledermatology

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Health Service (NHS) faced unprecedented changes to patient care, with specialties having to adapt using technology. At the outset of the pandemic our dermatology department already had a waiting list of > 800 new patient referrals [excluding 2-week-wait (2WW) patients], owing to the impending release of a new electronic patient record ('MyCare') platform. By redesigning pathways and reallocating surgical resources to remote consultation clinics we observed a paradoxical explosion in efficiency. Within 10 weeks of the onset of 'lockdown' we had virtually cleared the waiting list to 18 patients (which had peaked at 950 patients), using a combination of teledermatology, telephone clinics and video consultations. A solution was devised by consensus in the department. Urgent cases and possible [non-basal cell carcinoma (BCC)] cancers were still seen face to face. However, all other appointments became virtual, using telephone consultations and emailing photographs in a patient-directed store-and-forward approach. Where surgical lists for non-urgent BCC surgery had been cancelled, clinicians were allocated remote-consultation clinics, with temporal and geographical flexibility for delivery within their current job plans. Patients were invited to send skin photographs to a shared departmental NHS.net account that was initiated by trainees, to supplement telephone consultations where required. Quality was assisted by explaining simple photography techniques in a default email signature (https://www.bad.org.uk/shared/get-file.as#x?itemtype=document&id =5818). The issue of consent was managed practically for the majority;the act of sending a photograph inherently implied consent. Where necessary, patients had the option of signing a bespoke teledermatology consent form sent as an email attachment, enabling images to be saved to their medical record if required. Additional resources of benefit include Attend Anywhere video consultations, and M-modal digital dictation. Furthermore, to manage new patients referred after onset of the pandemic, Consultants are e-triaging all non-2WW referrals through e-RS using a Referral Assessment Service - with e-RS Advice and Guidance being used routinely, too. Teledermatology during the COVID-19 pandemic has not only compensated, but has also highlighted some advantages over traditional patient pathways. Clinicians and patients alike quickly acknowledged that a telephone call could often suffice, if not preferable to meeting in person. With a large catchment area, many patients were pleased to avoid the long journeys. COVID-19 catapulted everyone into unchartered territories, posing innumerable obstacles in delivering good patient care. With simple measures, we emerged having tackled our already inflated pending list. What is more, the delivery of traditional model of care was questioned. Who knew you could see a dermatologist over the phone?

A Survey on the E-learning platforms used during COVID-19

E-learning is globalized in a short period of time due to the physical distancing requirement for curbing the spread of COVID-19. There are two major challenges imposed by the migration from face-To-face learning to E-learning: live lecturing and lab sessions. In this survey, we studied the E-learning platforms used in the COVID-19 pandemic: learning management systems or course management systems, tools for live-lecturing and tools for lab sessions. We found that this migration is quite smooth with contemporary technologies and the Internet. Prescriptive suggestions are also provided for this migration. For the future trend of education, it is expected that E-learning will become a preferable education and learning style in the future, especially for self-study and life-long learning. © 2020 IEEE.

Reflections on the management of a coronavirus disease 2019 patient with refractory hyperglycemia

The cause and treatment of refractory hyperglycemia in a critically ill coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patient during treatment were analyzed retrospectively, indicating that novel coronavirus infection may cause damage to glucose metabolism, so the monitoring and control of blood glucose should be strengthened in clinical treatment. Copyright © 2020 by the Chinese Medical Association.

[The analysis of clinical characteristics of 34 novel coronavirus pneumonia cases in Ningxia Hui autonomous region].

Objective: To analyze the clinical characteristics of 34 COVID-19 cases and to provide the basis for the prevention and control of the epidemic disease. Methods: Thirty-four COVID-19 patients diagnosed with RT-PCR in the isolation ward of the Fourth People's Hospital of Ningxia Hui autonomous region (infectious diseases hospital) from the January 22 to February 4, 2020 were selected as the research subjects. The clinical data were collected. Excel was used to describe the relationship between clinical classification and age distribution, contact history and date of onset. SPSS 25.0 statistical software was used for analysis. The general information, clinical symptoms, blood test, virus nucleic acid test results, epidemiology, CT imaging, treatment and prognosis were analyzed. Results: There were 5 mild cases (5/34), 24 ordinary cases (24/34), 5 severe cases (5/34). The elderly was more common in severe patients. The main clinical symptoms were fever (27/34)and dry cough(26/34). The peripheral blood showed normal or decreased leukocyte count (33/34), decreased lymphocyte count (12/34). The increase of C-reactive protein (CRP) and D-dimer was related to the severity of the disease. Some patients had mild liver and kidney damage. Six patients were diagnosed through 3 or more times of nucleic acid tests. Sixteen cases had Wuhan related history,13 cases were close contacts, 5 cases had no confirmed route. The clustered infections were found in 6 families. In typical cases, CT showed single or multiple patchy ground glass shadow with thickening of interlobular septum. In severe cases, diffuse lesions of both lungs were found, with ground glass shadow, consolidation shadow and strip shadow coexisting. Thirty-four patients were treated with interferon-α and Lopinavir/Ritonavir with good prognosis. Conclusions: The clinical characteristics of COVID-19 were similar to that of general viral pneumonia but with strong infectivity. Close contact and family aggregation caused disease outbreaks. COVID-19 could not be excluded if two nucleic acid tests were negative and high-resolution CT was helpful for differential diagnosis. Early detection, early isolation, early diagnosis and early treatment are important for good prognosis. The effectiveness of antiviral drugs needs to be further verified.

[Clinical analysis of 31 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus infection in children from six provinces (autonomous region) of northern China].

Objective: To analyze the epidemiological history, clinical manifestations, treatment and the short-term prognosis of 31 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infection in children from six provinces (autonomous region) in northern China. Methods: A retrospective analysis of the epidemiological history, clinical symptoms, signs, laboratory examinations, chest imaging, treatment and the short-term prognosis of 31 cases of 2019-nCoV was conducted. The patients were diagnosed between January 25th, 2020 and February 21st, 2020 in 21 hospitals in 17 cities of six provinces (autonomous region) of Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Hebei, Henan and Shandong. Results: The age of the 31 children with 2019-nCoV infection was 7 years and 1 month (6 months-17 years). Nine cases (29%) were imported cases. Other 21 cases (68%) had contact with confirmed infected adults. One case (3%) had contact with asymptomatic returnees from Wuhan. Among the 31 children, 28 patients (90%) were family cluster cases. The clinical types were asymptomatic type in 4 cases (13%), mild type in 13 cases (42%), and common type in 14 cases (45%). No severe or critical type existed. The most common symptom was fever (n=20, 65%), including 1 case of high fever, 9 cases of moderate fever, 10 cases of low fever. Fever lasted from 1 day to 9 days. The fever of fifteen cases lasted for ≤3 d, while in other 5 cases lasted >3 d. Other symptoms included cough (n=14, 45%), fatigue (n=3, 10%) and diarrhea (n=3, 10%). Pharyngalgia, runny nose, dizziness, headache and vomiting were rare. In the early stage, the total leukocytes count in peripheral blood decreased in 2 cases (6%), the lymphocytes count decreased in 2 cases (6%), and the platelet count increased in 2 cases (6%).Elevation of C-reactive protein (10%, 3/30), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (19%, 4/21), procalcitonin (4%,1/28), liver enzyme (22%, 6/27) and muscle enzyme (15%, 4/27) occurred in different proportions. Renal function and blood glucose were normal. There were abnormal chest CT changes in 14 cases, including 9 cases with patchy ground glass opacities and nodules, mostly located in the lower lobe of both lungs near the pleural area. After receiving supportive treatment, the viral nucleic acid turned negative in 25 cases within 7-23 days. Among them, 24 children (77%) recovered and were discharged from hospital. No death occurred. Conclusions: In this case series, 2019-nCoV infection in children from six provinces (autonomous region) in northern China are mainly caused by close family contact. Clinical types are asymptomatic, mild and common types. Clinical manifestations and laboratory examination results are nonspecific. Close contact history of epidemiology, nucleic acid detection and chest imaging are important bases for diagnosis of 2019-nCoV infection. After general treatment, the short-term prognosis is good.

Preventive strategy for tumor patients during COVID-19 pandemic

Tumor patients are the high risk population of being infected by SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to reduce the infection risk of the tumor patients and maintain effective antitumor treatment, the preventive strategy for tumor patients in stationary phase, in treatment period, in immunosuppressor treatment, with fever, and involved in clinical trials, are discussed here with consideration of the disease features of the tumor patients and the experience of pharmaceutical care. In addition, suggestions regarding daily protection, diet and follow-up strategy for the tumor patients are provided.