The Impacts of COVID-19 on Distance Education with the Application of Traditional and Digital Appliances: Evidence from 60 Developing Countries.

Educational disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic during school closures have become a remarkable social issue, particularly among the developing countries. Ample literature has verified the adverse effects of the long-lasing epidemic on school education. However, rare studies seek to understand the association between the severity of COVID-19 and distance learning, an alternative education pattern, and foster policy designs to promote educational transition, particularly targeting the post-crisis phase of the COVID-19. By combining four data surveys, this article empirically examines the impacts of COVID-19 on children's distance education with the application of various appliances across 60 developing countries. The results suggest that, after controlling socio-economic, geographic, and demographic variables, a higher level of mortality rate of COVID-19 contributes to more households participating in distance education. In particular, this positive term is larger for distance education by using TVs and radios compared with the usage of digital appliances. To explore the potential channel of the above linkage, this article argues that the positive association between mortality rate and the use of traditional appliances is weakened through higher levels of stringency in lockdown measures. Timely policies are, therefore, recommended to guide towards distance learning with economic and technological supports to guarantee a wave of inclusive educational recovery in the ongoing post-COVID-19 era.

The Impacts of COVID-19 on Distance Education with the Application of Traditional and Digital Appliances: Evidence from 60 Developing Countries

Educational disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic during school closures have become a remarkable social issue, particularly among the developing countries. Ample literature has verified the adverse effects of the long-lasing epidemic on school education. However, rare studies seek to understand the association between the severity of COVID-19 and distance learning, an alternative education pattern, and foster policy designs to promote educational transition, particularly targeting the post-crisis phase of the COVID-19. By combining four data surveys, this article empirically examines the impacts of COVID-19 on children's distance education with the application of various appliances across 60 developing countries. The results suggest that, after controlling socio-economic, geographic, and demographic variables, a higher level of mortality rate of COVID-19 contributes to more households participating in distance education. In particular, this positive term is larger for distance education by using TVs and radios compared with the usage of digital appliances. To explore the potential channel of the above linkage, this article argues that the positive association between mortality rate and the use of traditional appliances is weakened through higher levels of stringency in lockdown measures. Timely policies are, therefore, recommended to guide towards distance learning with economic and technological supports to guarantee a wave of inclusive educational recovery in the ongoing post-COVID-19 era.

Visual representations of SARS-CoV-2, emotions, and risk perception of COVID-19.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and many other organizations published many images of its pathogen (namely SARS-CoV-2) to raise public awareness of the disease. Despite their scientific and aesthetic values, such images may convey metaphoric meanings and cause a subsequent impact on viewers' fear and disgust. This study investigated how exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 images might shape viewers' fear, disgust, and risk perception of COVID-19. METHODS: Seventy images depicting the SARS-CoV-2 were collected from the websites of CDC, NIAID, and third-party organizations in early 2020. We first showed the images to a group of 492 adults recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and asked them to rate their levels of fear and disgust for each image. Results of this pre-test allowed us to identify images that evoked high, medium, and low levels of fear and disgust, which were then used as treatment stimuli for an online experiment with a national sample of 500 U.S. adults. RESULTS: Exposure to the selected SARS-CoV-2 images caused different levels of disgust, but not fear, among the members of the national sample. Noticeably, the images evoking the highest level of disgust backfired among those who were least concerned about COVID and caused less fear than images evoking the lowest level of disgust. Image exposure was not associated with risk perception of the disease. CONCLUSION: This study found that the seemingly objective visualizations of the SARS-CoV-2 are not emotionally neutral. Scientists, agencies, and media professionals should be mindful of the potential emotional impact of science visualizations, such as when creating the iconic image for COVID-19 or other infectious diseases.

How public perceptions of social distancing evolved over a critical time period: communication lessons learnt from the American state of Wisconsin

Understanding how individuals perceive the barriers and benefits of precautionary actions is key for effective communication about public health crises, such as the COVID-19 outbreak. This study used innovative computational methods to analyze 30,000 open-ended responses from a large-scale survey to track how Wisconsin (U.S.A.) residents' perceptions of the benefits of and barriers to performing social distancing evolved over a critical time period (March 19th to April 1st, 2020). Initially, the main barrier was practical related, however, individuals later perceived more multifaceted barriers to social distancing. Communication about COVID-19 should be dynamic and evolve to address people's experiences and needs overtime.

"A community system": A critical foundation for the epidemic prevention and control of SARS-CoV-2.

In response to COVID-19 that has constituted a global pandemic, countries around the world have successively adopted a myriad of prevention and control measures. As the first country with the COVID-19 outbreak, the Chinese government has adopted a series of timely and strict prevention and control measures against the spread of the SARS-CoV-2, which has effectively slowed down the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 and created a valuable window for the international community to overcome the epidemic. China's experience in combating the COVID-19 has shown that building a community prevention and control system is essential to control the spread of coronavirus. As the backbone of the epidemic prevention and control system, the community prevention and control system plays an important role in improving the pattern of disorderly medical treatment, screening suspected patients, preventing the input of pathogens, ensuring residents' medical needs, stabilizing public sentiment, reducing disease fear, and maintaining residents' national security. At the same time, it also exposed the problems of the community prevention and control epidemic system in terms of infrastructure, human resources, and internal systems. Based on this, this article suggests that we should improve the hardware facilities of community, improve the internal mechanism of the community, strengthen the stability of the community talent team, improve the level of linkage between the community and other departments to prevent and control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, effectively use information technology and actively mobilize social forces to help community prevention and control COVID-19.

The influence of coronavirus disease 2019 on emergency department visits in Nanjing, China: A multicentre cross-sectional study.

INTRODUCTION: Influenza has been linked to the crowding in emergency departments (ED) across the world. The impact of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on China EDs has been quite different from those during past influenza outbreaks. Our objective was to determine if COVID-19 changed ED visit disease severity during the pandemic. METHODS: This was a retrospective cross sectional study conducted in Nanjing, China. We captured ED visit data from 28 hospitals. We then compared visit numbers from October 2019 to February 2020 for a month-to-month analysis and every February from 2017 to 2020 for a year-to-year analysis. Inter-group chi-square test and time series trend tests were performed to compare visit numbers. The primary outcome was the proportion of severe disease visits in the EDs. RESULTS: Through February 29 th 2020, there were 93 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients in Nanjing, of which 40 cases (43.01%) were first seen in the ED. The total number of ED visits in Nanjing in February 2020, were dramatically decreased (n = 99,949) in compared to January 2020 (n = 313,125) and February 2019 (n = 262,503). Except for poisoning, the severe diseases in EDs all decreased in absolute number, but increased in proportion both in year-to-year and month-to-month analyses. This increase in proportional ED disease severity was greater in higher-level referral hospitals when compared year by year. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 outbreak has been associated with decreases in ED visits in Nanjing, China, but increases in the proportion of severe ED visits.