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In recent years, the global economic situation and the development of the international shipping industry have been deeply affected by COVID-19. Since 2021, China has gradually recovered its international shipping supply chain industry with the help of government policy support, and its GDP has grown by 8.1% year by year. Under this favorable macroeconomic background, the Yangtze River waterway transportation, with its good waterway conditions, has led to the continuous increase in transportation demands. However, while pursuing rapid economic growth, ensuring the navigation safety and rescue of ships in the waterway has been one of the key issues of concern for maritime divisions along the Yangtze River. Therefore, combined with the network date envelopment data (DEA) model, this study intends to construct a new set of performance evaluation models in line with their safety supervision and rescue capability based on the daily work characteristics of the Changjiang Maritime Safety Administration (MSA). The occurrence of disasters in their port areas has been taken into consideration as the key undesirable variable. This study hopes to screen out worthy pacesetter representatives, and further suggests more targeted improvement options for inefficient maritime authorities to facilitate more effective safety supervision in the future.
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Purpose To investigate the trends of myopia among primary and junior school students in the post-COVID-19 epidemic period. Method A prospective of cross-sectional study using spot photoscreenings in 123,538 children among primary and junior school students from 2019 to 2021 was conducted to evaluate the development of myopia in Xuzhou, China in the post-COVID-19 epidemic period. Equivalent refraction and the prevalence of myopia were recorded. Results The spherical equivalent refraction of myopia decreased across all grades except grade 1 (0.23 ± 0.56 D in 2019, 0.24 ± 0.63 D in 2020) from 2019 to 2020. However, refraction exhibited a hyperopic shift in 2021 compared to 2020 for grades 1–5 (no significant decreased for grade 4). The prevalence of myopia in all grades increased in 2020 compared to 2019, and the most dramatic changes were observed from grades 2–5 and grades 7–8 (P < 0.05). The changes in myopia prevalence in grades 1–4 were mild, and the reduction in myopia for Grade 5 is significant from 2020 to 2021. Nevertheless, students in grades 6 and 9 exhibited the greatest growth in myopia prevalence (P < 0.01). All grades had higher myopia prevalence in 2021 compared with 2019, except grade 1 (P = 0.25). The prevalence of myopia in girls was higher compared with boys, and the urban myopia prevalence was higher than in rural areas over the 3 years except in 2019 (P = 0.18). Conclusions The prevalence of myopia increased during the COVID-19 epidemic. However, the spherical equivalent refraction of lower grade children drifted to hyperopia and the trends of myopia development remained stable in the post-COVID-19 epidemic period. We should be more concerned about the prevalence of myopia in graduating for the primary or junior grades in the future.
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Background Under the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a large amount of COVID-19-related information can cause an individual's perceived information overload, further halting the individual's psychological health. As a minor psychological discomfort could develop severe mental disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder, it is necessary to understand the chain linkage of COVID-19 information overload turn to posttraumatic stress disorder to ensure timely intervention can be offered at each point of mental state transformation. Hence, we examined the negative outcomes of COVID-19 information overload and investigated the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 on posttraumatic stress disorder. Methods A convenient sample of Chinese adults (n = 1150) was investigated by an online survey from July 2020 to March 2021. The extent of COVID-19 information overload was measured by the information overload severity scale on the text of the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological distress symptoms were measured using a 7-item anxiety scale (GAD-7), the 9-item Patient Health Questionnaire depression module (PHQ-9), and the psychometric properties of the PTSD Checklist (PCL-C). Structural equation modeling and bootstrap methods were utilized to analyze the relationships between variables. Results COVID-19 information overload is positively related to an individual's anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Furthermore, COVID-19 information overload can indirectly affect an individual's PTSD symptoms by increasing the feeling of depression. R2 values of anxiety, depression, and PTSD were 0.471, 0.324, and 0.795, respectively. Conclusion COVID-19 information overload, anxiety, depression, and PTSD are negative psychological states, and each variable is closely linked with the others, suggesting the need for potential psychological interventions at specific times. Practical public training, such as crisis coping and information filtering, is essential. Regulation of technology companies is also essential.
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Background. Robust biomarkers that predict disease outcomes amongst COVID19 patients are necessary for both patient triage and resource prioritisation. Numerous candidate biomarkers have been proposed for COVID19. However, at present, there is no consensus on the best diagnostic approach to predict outcomes in infected patients. Moreover, it is not clear whether such tools would apply to other potentially pandemic pathogens and therefore of use as stockpile for future pandemic preparedness. Methods. We conducted a multi cohort observational study to investigate the biology and the prognostic role of interferon alpha inducible protein 27 (IFI27) in COVID19 patients. Findings. We show that IFI27 is expressed in the respiratory tract of COVID19 patients and elevated IFI27 expression is associated with the presence of a high viral load. We further demonstrate that systemic host response, as measured by blood IFI27 expression, is associated with COVID19 severity. For clinical outcome prediction (e.g. respiratory failure), IFI27 expression displays a high positive (0.83) and negative (0.95) predictive value, outperforming all other known predictors of COVID19 severity. Furthermore, IFI27 is upregulated in the blood of infected patients in response to other respiratory viruses. For example, in the pandemic H1N1/09 swine influenza virus infection, IFI27 like genes were highly upregulated in the blood samples of severely infected patients. Interpretation. These data suggest that prognostic biomarkers targeting the family of IFI27 genes could potentially supplement conventional diagnostic tools in future virus pandemics, independent of whether such pandemics are caused by a coronavirus, an influenza virus or another as yet to be discovered respiratory virus.
Subject(s)
Infections , Hematologic Diseases , Tumor Virus Infections , COVID-19 , Respiratory InsufficiencyABSTRACT
Water is essential for a sustainable economic prosperity, but rapid economic growth and intensive agricultural activities usually cause water pollution. The middle and lower reaches of China’s Yangtze River Basin were urbanized and industrialized much earlier than the upper reach and have been suffering from water pollution. In the past two decades, economic growth accelerated in the upper reach due to several national economic initiatives. Based on analyzing water quality changes from 2000 to 2019 and during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 for Chengdu in the upper reach, we hope to provide some water governance suggestions. In 2019, water at 66% of 93 sites in Chengdu did not achieve the national III standards using measurements of 23 water quality parameters. The top two pollutants were total nitrogen (TN) and fecal coliform (FC). From 2000 to 2019, water quality was not significantly improved at the non-background sites of Chengdu's Min Basin, and the pollution in this basin was mainly from local pollutants release. During the same period, water quality deteriorated in Chengdu’s Tuo Basin, where pollution was the result of pollutant discharges in Chengdu in addition to inter-city pollutant transport. During the COVID-19 lockdown, water quality generally improved in the Min Basin but not in the Tuo Basin. A further investigation on which pollution sources were shut down or not during the lockdown can help make pollution reduction targets. Based on the results, we provide suggestions to strengthen inter-jurisdictional and inter-institutional cooperation, water quality monitoring and evaluation, and ecological engineering application.
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Background The corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic poses a severe challenge to public health, especially to those patients with underlying diseases. In this meta-analysis, we studied the prevalence of cancer among patients with COVID-19 infection and their risks of severe events. Methods We searched the Pubmed, Embase and MedRxiv databases for studies between December 2019 and May 3, 2020 using the following key words and terms: sars-cov-2, covid-19, 2019-ncov, 2019 novel coronavirus, corona virus disease-2019, clinical, clinical characteristics, clinical course, epidemiologic features, epidemiology, and epidemiological characteristics. We extracted data following PICO (patient, intervention, comparison and outcome) chart. Statistical analyses were performed with R Studio (version 3.5.1) on the group-level data. We assessed the studies risk of bias in accordance to the adjusted Joanna Briggs Institute. We estimated the prevalence or risks for severe events including admission into intensive care unit or death using meta-analysis with random effects. Findings Out of the 2,551 studies identified, 32 studies comprising 21,248 participants have confirmed COVID-19. The total prevalence of cancer in COVID-19 patients was 3.97% (95% CI, 3.08% to 5.12%), higher than that of the total cancer rate (0.29%) in China. Stratification analysis showed that the overall cancer prevalence of COVID-19 patients in China was 2.59% (95% CI, 1.72% to 3.90%), and the prevalence reached 3.79% in Wuhan (95% CI, 2.51% to 5.70%) and 2.31% (95% CI, 1.16% to 4.57%) in other areas outside Wuhan in China. The incidence of ICU admission in cancer patients with COVID-19 was 26.80% (95% CI, 21.65% to 32.67%) and the mortality was 24.32% (95% CI, 13.95% to 38.91%), much higher than the overall rates of COVID-19 patients in China. The fatality in COVID patients with cancer was lower than those with cardiovascular disease (OR 0.49; 95% CI, 0.34 to 0.71; p=0.39), but comparable with other comorbidities such as diabetes (OR 1.32; 95% CI, 0.42 to 4.11; p=0.19), hypertension (OR 1.27; 95% CI, 0.35 to 4.62; p=0.13), and respiratory diseases (OR 0.79; 95% CI, 0.47 to 1.33; p=0.45). Interpretation This comprehensive meta-analysis on the largest number of patients to date provides solid evidence that COVID-19 infection significantly and negatively affected the disease course and prognosis of cancer patients. Awareness of this could help guide clinicians and health policy makers in combating cancer in the context of COVID-19 pandemic.