Analysis of a Typical COVID-19 Outbreak Spread by Tourist Groups

Background: Novel coronavirus disease (SARS-COV-2 infection or COVID-19) is a respiratory tract infection that has been linked to severe acute respiratory syndrome transmitted particularly through touching and respiration. The purpose of this study is to understand the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 cases in a typical tourist-related outbreak and explore the possible route for its transmission. Method(s): All data and epidemiological survey reports of COVID-19 cases in the outbreak were reported by provincial and urban (county) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health Commissions nationwide from October 16th to November 5th, 2021. The epidemiological survey reports included information on gender, age, source of infection (imported from other provinces or locally acquired), daily life track and itinerary, date of symptom onset, and date of diagnosis. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistical methods, one-way analysis of variance, independent t-test, and Chi-square tests. Histograms and percentage stacked area plots were used to describe the epidemiological characteristics of the outbreaks. Result(s): The COVID-19 outbreak associated with the tourist groups has involved 551 COVID-19 cases, with a median age of 44 years (interquartile range: 30-59 years), gradually spreading from the northwestern region to the national level across 15 provinces of China. One-fifth of the cases (16.0%) had traveled to Ejin Banner, resulting in 68 second-generation cases. We estimated an outbreak on 11 flights and 19 trains, accounting for a total of 27 confirmed cases. In addition, 42 clusters of outbreak cases were also reported to occur, 21 (50.0%) in households and 10 (23.81%) in restaurants. About 106 confirmed cases were related to the gatherings in restaurants. The median incubation period for this COVID-19 outbreak was 7 days (inter-quartile range: 5-10 days). Conclusion(s): The survey results indicated that this COVID-19 outbreak originated in Ejin Banner and was spread by tourist groups, which was a typical infection outbreak promoted by travel. Our results further confirmed that travel needs to be more strictly weighed in pandemics like COVID-19, and people need to pay more attention to the prevention against infectious diseases, particularly when traveling in a tourist group.Copyright © 2022 Zheng et al.

Analysis of a Typical COVID-19 Outbreak Spread by Tourist Groups

Background: Novel coronavirus disease (SARS-COV-2 infection or COVID-19) is a respiratory tract infection that has been linked to severe acute respiratory syndrome transmitted particularly through touching and respiration. The purpose of this study is to understand the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 cases in a typical tourist-related outbreak and explore the possible route for its transmission. Method(s): All data and epidemiological survey reports of COVID-19 cases in the outbreak were reported by provincial and urban (county) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health Commissions nationwide from October 16th to November 5th, 2021. The epidemiological survey reports included information on gender, age, source of infection (imported from other provinces or locally acquired), daily life track and itinerary, date of symptom onset, and date of diagnosis. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistical methods, one-way analysis of variance, independent t-test, and Chi-square tests. Histograms and percentage stacked area plots were used to describe the epidemiological characteristics of the outbreaks. Result(s): The COVID-19 outbreak associated with the tourist groups has involved 551 COVID-19 cases, with a median age of 44 years (interquartile range: 30-59 years), gradually spreading from the northwestern region to the national level across 15 provinces of China. One-fifth of the cases (16.0%) had traveled to Ejin Banner, resulting in 68 second-generation cases. We estimated an outbreak on 11 flights and 19 trains, accounting for a total of 27 confirmed cases. In addition, 42 clusters of outbreak cases were also reported to occur, 21 (50.0%) in households and 10 (23.81%) in restaurants. About 106 confirmed cases were related to the gatherings in restaurants. The median incubation period for this COVID-19 outbreak was 7 days (inter-quartile range: 5-10 days). Conclusion(s): The survey results indicated that this COVID-19 outbreak originated in Ejin Banner and was spread by tourist groups, which was a typical infection outbreak promoted by travel. Our results further confirmed that travel needs to be more strictly weighed in pandemics like COVID-19, and people need to pay more attention to the prevention against infectious diseases, particularly when traveling in a tourist group. Copyright © 2022 Zheng et al.

Research on online reviews of popular restaurants based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation Theme Model

Online popular restaurants are those that are widely concerned by the society and sought after by the public through we media platform or internet marketing. Online comment is the product of the information age. The daily life of Internet users is to exchange information, express views and communicate with others through major Internet platforms. The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 has hit the catering industry in China. According to the statistics of the existing literature, it is found that there are few studies on online popular restaurants, and the research methods are relatively simple and traditional. The research on online comments of online popular restaurants can explore the emotional tendency of consumers, find the problems existing in online popular restaurants and put forward corresponding development suggestions. This paper uses Python technology to obtain the comments of 30 popular restaurants in Dalian on the public comment website, and puts forward corresponding opinions and suggestions on the operation of online popular restaurants through data mining. It is concluded that consumers care about the following aspects in the consumption process: taste, service, decoration style, waiting time in line. In this regard, we put forward the following suggestions: improve the taste of food, constantly push through the old and bring forth the new, and the primary task for the sustainable development of the restaurant is to ensure the taste;Improve service quality and create a high-quality service culture;Create a unique decoration style and resolutely resist and crack down on piracy;Reduce waiting time or provide better service during waiting time. © 2022 SPIE.

INEQUITIES IN PHYSICAL DISTANCING PRACTICES IN THE US WORKPLACE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

SESSION TITLE: What Lessons Will We Take From the Pandemic? SESSION TYPE: Rapid Fire Original Inv PRESENTED ON: 10/19/2022 11:15 am - 12:15 pm PURPOSE: Physical distancing is a fundamental community mitigation strategy that averts adverse health outcomes from COVID-19 and other transmissible illnesses. Despite national policies in place, racial/ethnic minority groups and individuals with lower socioeconomic status had disproportionately worse COVID-19 outcomes. Barriers to adherence to these public health recommendations may underlie some of these disparities. We, therefore, examined physical distancing practices according to racial/ethnic group, educational attainment, and income level in the US. METHODS: The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), an annual cross-sectional survey that collects health indicators for noninstitutionalized civilians, was queried for adult respondents interviewed in 2020. We included adults who were working at any point in the past 12 months prior to the interview. Respondents working the week prior to the interview were identified in subgroup analyses. The outcomes of interest were rates of self-reported physical distancing measures in the workplace and non-adherence to these measures. Sample-weighted proportions and 95% confidence intervals were estimated and Pearson χ2 tests (α=0.05) were conducted to compare outcomes across racial/ethnic, educational, and income categories. Data were publicly available and deidentified, therefore institutional review was not sought. RESULTS: 9,501 respondents aged ≥18 years reported working at any point in the past 12 months prior to the interview. After weighting, 88.3% (n=8,427) reported having physical distancing measures in the workplace. In subgroup analyses of 8,394 individuals who worked in the last week, 91.2% (n=7,713) reported currently having physical distancing measures in the workplace. Rates of having social distancing measures in the workplace were higher with increasing educational attainment and income level (Table). Black and Hispanic individuals worked at places with higher rates of non-adherence to physical distancing measures compared with White and Asian respondents. Rates of non-adherence to physical distancing in the workplace were lower with increasing educational attainment and income level (Table). CONCLUSIONS: In 2020, higher rates of having physical distancing measures in the workplace were seen among more educated and higher-income individuals. Higher rates of non-adherence to these measures at the place of work were seen among Black and Hispanic individuals and those with lower educational attainment and income level. Limitations of this study include the self-reported nature of data, small sample sizes of some minority populations, and lack of granularity in work settings. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Varying working conditions are possible barriers to adherence to public policies. Future efforts are needed to elucidate and mitigate the factors behind inequities in the ability to adhere to public health recommendations and disparities in health outcomes. DISCLOSURES: No relevant relationships by Deepak Bhatt No relevant relationships by Edward Christopher Dee No relevant relationships by Enrico Ferro No relevant relationships by Bhav Jain No relevant relationships by Bisola Ojikutu No relevant relationships by Joseph Alexander Paguio No relevant relationships by Jasper Seth Yao

Research progress on oral characterization of Corona Virus Disease 2019

Corona Virus Disease 2019 (Corona Virus Disease 2019，COVID-19) has become a public health emergency that has attracted global attention because of its large-scale outbreak resulting in numerous human infections and deaths. COVID-19 is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV. Due to a large number of infections and fast transmission speed, it's significant to diagnose the infected people quickly and detect the asymptomatic infected people as soon as possible. At present, the preliminary screening is judged by the clinical manifestations of the patients, mainly involving the respiratory system, but recent studies have found that the patients infected with COVID-19 have unique oral manifestations, such as taste disturbance, xerostomia, halitosis, inflammation of salivary glands, necrotizing periodontal disease and some of them are earlier than typical symptoms such as dry cough, fever, etc. Paying attention to the oral manifestations of patients can further improve the COVID-19 screening procedure. At present, symptomatic treatment is mainly used for these oral symptoms. © 2022, J Prev Treat Stomatol Dis. All rights reserved.

DSP Gene Mutation – A Cause of Recurrent Myocarditis: A Case Series

Myocarditis has gained clinical awareness with the current COVID-19 pandemic. A recent ESC Expert Consensus document discussing management of acute myocarditis and chronic inflammatory cardiomyopathy has been published [1]. Although the document alludes to genetic predisposition, by stating that “patients with mutations responsible for arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy may be at risk for acute myocarditis,” the growing clinical experience in this area suggests that perhaps pursuit of an inflammatory diagnosis has been at the cost of recognising an underlying genetic cause, with important implications for the patient and their family. Desmoplakin (DSP)-related arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (AC) is characterised by LV systolic dysfunction, subepicardial late gadolinium enhancement on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) and frequent ventricular ectopy [2,3]. In ∼15% of DSP-related AC involving the LV, a clinical event indistinguishable from myocarditis can be the initial manifestation [4]. Myocarditis often precedes fibrosis and LV dysfunction. In this case series, we describe 3 unrelated young individuals (aged 21–28 years) diagnosed by our service with DSP pathogenic variants. In all cases the initial diagnosis was myocarditis and the diagnostic odyssey was characterised by multiple presentations with significant troponin elevations, including one in whom chronic inflammatory myocarditis was the diagnosis over many years. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, presentations for myocarditis have increased considerably [5]. This has increased the importance of the clinician considering genetic arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy as an alternative diagnosis. Any case of myocarditis should prompt 3-generational family history, and recurrent presenters should have a CMR and be referred for consideration of genetic testing.

The SARS-CoV-2 rS1-E-PLGA nanovaccine and evaluation of its immune effect in BALB/c mice.

OBJECTIVE: Vaccination is an important method for preventing COVID-19 infection. However, certain vaccines do not meet the current needs. To improve the vaccine effect, discard ineffective antigens, and focus on high-quality antigenic clusters, S1-E bivalent antigens were designed. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Vaccine delivery is performed using poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA). Here, the recombinant S1-E (rS1-E) was covered on PLGA and injected intramuscularly into mice. In total, 48 BALB/c mice were randomly divided into six groups with 8 mice in each group. The mice received intramuscular injections. Prior to vaccination, the hydrophobicity of the rS1-E and the antigenic site of the E protein were both analysed. The morphology, zeta potential, and particle size distribution of rS1-E-PLGA were examined. Anti-S1 and anti-E antibodies were detected in mouse serum by ELISA. Neutralising an-tibodies were detected by co-incubating the pseudovirus with the obtained serum. IL-2 and TNF-α levels were also measured. RESULTS: The designed recombinant S1-E protein was successfully coated on PLGA nanoparticles. rS1-E-PLGA nanovaccine has suitable size, shape, good stability, sustained release and other characteristics. Importantly, mice were stimulated with rS1-E-PLGA nanovaccines to produce high-titre antibodies and a good cellular immune response. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that rS1-E-PLGA nanovaccine may provide a good protective effect, and the vaccine should be further investigated in human clinical trials for use in vaccination or as a booster.

Improved VGG-16 Neural Network for Parameter Reduction

With the development of Deep Learning, image recognition technology has been applied in many aspects. And convolutional neural networks have played a key role in realizing image recognition under the increasing computing power and massive data. However, if developers want to implement the training of convolutional neural networks and achieve the subsequent applications in scenarios such as personal computers, IoT devices, and embedded platforms with low Graphics Processing Units(GPUs) memory, a large number of parameters during training of convolutional neural networks is a great challenge. Therefore, this paper uses depthwise separable convolution to optimize the classic convolutional neural network model VGG-16 to solve this problem. And the VGG-16-JS model is proposed using the Inception structure dimensionality reduction and depthwise separable convolution on the VGG-16 convolutional neural network model. Finally, this paper compares the classification success rates of VGG-16 and VGG-16-JS for the application scenario of the COVID-19 mask-wearing. A series of reliable experimental data show that the improved VGG-16-JS model significantly reduces the number of parameters required for model training without a significant drop in the success rate. It solves the GPU memory requirements for training neural networks to a certain extent. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Alteration of right ventricular function after catheter ablation in patients with persistent atrial fibrillation and concomitant heart failure with preserved ejection fraction

Objective To investigate the alteration of right ventricular function after catheter ablation in patients with persistent atrial fibrillation (PAF) and concomitant heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Methods The prospective observational study was performed in patients with HFpEF-PAF and undergoing first-time radiofrequency ablation procedures in the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University between May to December 2019. Right ventricular functional parameters were measured before and 5 days, 1, 3, 6 and 12 months after the ablation by transthoracic echocardiography, respectively, including the right ventricular fractional area change (RVFAC). tricuspid annular plane systolic excursion(TAPSE), tricuspid annular diameter (TVAD). tricuspid annular peak systolic speed(TDI-S) and longitudinal strain of right ventricular free wall (RVFLS). Meanwhile, routine ECG and Holler recordings were performed at each follow-up time point. Results In this study, atrial fibrillation (AF) recurrence occurred in 4 patients at the 3rd month after ablation, and 7 patients failed to follow up due to the Covid-19. Finally, 19 patients were followed up for the evaluation of cardiac function after catheter ablation. Compared with pre-ablation, right ventricular structural and functional paramters (RVFAC, TAPSE, TVAD, TDI-S. RVFLS) improved significantly at all stages of follow-up(all P <0.05). Patients with atrial fibrillation recurrence had lower RVFLS and TDI-S at the baseline(P =0.039, P =0.019). Conclusions Right ventricular function could improve in HFpEF-PAF patients who maintain sinus rhythm after radiofrequency ablation. © 2022 ChinJUltrasonogr. All rights reserved.

The Development of Job Aids to Support the Use of Field Instruments, Methods, and Techniques by Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Environmental Emergency Personnel

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC’s) Emergencies Science and Technology Section (ESTS) is tasked with providing scientific and technical advice to its federal partners during environmental emergencies including oil spill incidents. In addition, ESTS maintains a wide array of field instrumentation and equipment, which is available to support different areas of a spill response such as detection and monitoring, health and safety, and sampling. During a response, ESTS needs to quickly, and effectively, convey to ECCC Environmental Emergencies Officers what tools and equipment could be available for the response, and how they can help meet ECCCs objectives for the response. This can often be a challenge, especially when ESTS personnel cannot deploy on-site alongside the instrumentation and equipment, as the information must be provided in an easily understandable format, yet thorough enough to ensure proper usage of the particular tool or piece of equipment. To address these challenges, ESTS has begun the development of a suite of job aids or “Tactical Sheets”. Each Tactical Sheet contains necessary, condensed, information on a field method or equipment maintained by ESTS for use at an environmental emergency. The goal of these Tactical Sheets is to highlight what the specific objectives for ECCC are, and how a given piece of equipment or method can help meet that objective at a response. These Tactical Sheets come with a number of features including a standardized format, a visually appealing design layout, a required equipment list, a simplified procedure, and a summary of the typical use for the particular tool or piece of equipment. ESTS has begun trialing these Tactical Sheets at certain incidents throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to increase ESTS’ capability of providing remote support when on-site presence is not an option. These Tactical Sheets are meant to bolster ESTS’ portfolio of support options available to our partners during environmental emergency responses. This paper will present information on the program to update field methods used during an environmental emergency by ECCC. © 2022 44th AMOP Technical Seminar on Environmental Contamination and Response. All rights reserved.

Financial Risk Prediction Based on Stochastic Block and Cox Proportional Hazards Models

Since 2019, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has made huge impacts on various aspects of society, especially the financial industries that are closely related to the national economy and people’s livelihood. Finance is a data-intensive field and its traditional research models include supervised and unsupervised models, state-based models, econometric models, and stochastic models. However, the above models are prone to lose their effectiveness in the situation of an extremely complex financial ecosystem with a large number of nonlinear unpredictable effects, such as those caused by COVID-19. To address this issue, we comprehensively explore and fuse Stochastic Block Model (SBM) and Cox Proportional Hazards Model (COX) for a reliable and accurate financial risk prediction. Specifically, SBM, which is popular in social network analysis, is employed to capture the impact factors on the financial industry in public emergencies, and COX is then leveraged to determine the duration of the impact factors. An extensive experimental evaluation validates the effectiveness of our framework in predicting financial risk. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The Life of a Myxoma—Transoesophageal Images of the Progressive Growth of a Myxoma Over a 19-month Period

Introduction: A paucity in data exists regarding the expected growth rate of myxomas given the prompt transition to surgical intervention on initial discovery. Most case reports describe an initial normal echocardiogram compared with a subsequent echocardiogram revealing a myxoma at the time of diagnosis [1-3]. Uniquely, our case follows the sequential monitored growth of an atrial myxoma with transoesophageal images over a 19-month period. Case: This case describes a 71-year-old woman with a history of hypertension and hypercholesterolaemia admitted with a provoked deep vein thrombosis. This was complicated by bilateral pulmonary emboli and a presumed paradoxical embolus through a patent foramen ovale (PFO) resulting in a middle cerebral artery stroke. She was thrombolysed, then managed with rivaroxaban. During PFO closure, intraoperative transoesophageal echocardiogram (TOE) revealed a new left-sided atrial mass 1.0cm x 0.6cm in size, resulting in procedure abandonment. Uncertainty around diagnosis in addition to delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic led to serial imaging. The mass was monitored via TOE at 5, 11 and 19 months, revealing an initially stable then unexpected rapid progression to a size of 3.6cm x 2.9cm in the final 8 months. The patient had prompt excision of her myxoma and patch closure of interatrial septum. Discussion: This case exhibits a rare opportunity to appreciate the visual progression of an atrial myxoma and the unpredictable rapid growth over an 8-month period, highlighting the importance of interval monitoring of undifferentiated atrial lesions. [Formula presented]

Mining the Associations between V(D)J Gene Segments and COVID-19 Disease Characteristics

The emerging COVID-19 variants lead to a new wave of infections, spreading more rapidly with more severe illnesses. The adaptive immune system plays an essential role in the control and clearance of viral infection and influences clinical outcomes. However, the understanding of the adaptive immune responses to COVID-19 is not sufficient, which impedes the development progress of treatments and vaccines. To address this issue, we proposed a machine-learning-based method (termed as VDJ-Seg-Miner) to mine the underlying associations between the V(D)J gene segments of the T cell receptor in personalized immune repertoires and COVID-19 disease characteristics for immune system analysis. Our VDJ-Seg-Miner can interpretively reveal multiple associations between the V(D)J gene segments and COVID-19 disease characteristics and assign confidence scores to indicate its confidence in each revealed association. Furthermore, experimental results based on the real-world dataset suggested that the identified associations were highly consistent with those reported in previous work. © 2021 IEEE.

An Interpretable Multi-Level Enhanced Graph Attention Network for Disease Diagnosis with Gene Expression Data

Clinical omics, especially gene expression data, have been widely studied and successfully applied for disease diagnosis using machine learning techniques. As genes often work interactively rather than individually, investigating co-functional gene modules can improve our understanding of disease mechanisms and facilitate disease state prediction. To this end, we in this paper propose a novel Multi-Level Enhanced Graph ATtention (MLE-GAT) network to explore the gene modules and intergene relational information contained in the omics data. In specific, we first format the omics data of each patient into co-expression graphs using weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) and then feed them to a well-designed multi-level graph feature fully fusion (MGFFF) module for disease diagnosis. For model interpretation, we develop a novel full-gradient graph saliency (FGS) mechanism to identify the disease-relevant genes. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed MLE-GAT achieves state-of-the-art performance on transcriptomics data from TCGA-LGG/TCGA-GBM and proteomics data from COVID-19/non-COVID-19 patient sera. © 2021 IEEE.

Thermally Activated Charge Transfer in Dual-Emission Mn2+-Alloyed Perovskite Quantum Wells for Luminescent Thermometers

Owing to the pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the demands on ultracold-chain logistics have rapidly increased for the storage and transport of mRNA vaccines. Herein, we report a soluble luminescent thermometer based on thermally activated dual-emissions of Mn2+-alloyed 2D perovskite quantum wells (QWs). Owing to the Mn2+ alloying, the binding energy of perovskite QW exciton is reduced from 291 to 100 meV. It facilitates the dissociation of excitons into free charge carriers, which are then transferred and trapped on Mn2+. The temperature-dependent charge transfer efficiency can be tuned from 8.8% (-93 °C) to 30.6% (25 °C), leading to continuous ratiometrical modulation from exciton-dominated violet emission to Mn2+-dominated orange emission. The highest sensitivity (1.44% per K) is approximately twice that of the Mn2+-doped chalcogenide quantum dots. Taking advantage of highly reversible color switching, Mn2+-alloyed QWs provide an economical solution to monitor the ultracold-chain logistics of the COVID-19 vaccine. © 2022 American Chemical Society.

Incidence of adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccination: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Objective: To systematically evaluate the incidence of adverse reactions to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination. Methods: We systematically searched PubMed, Embase, The Cochrane Library, Web of Science, CNKI, WanFang Data, and VIP Database from the inception of each database to August 31, 2021. Randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) on the safety of different types of COVID-19 vaccines were retrieved and analyzed. A random or fixed-effects model was used with an odds ratio as the effect size. The quality of each reference was evaluated. The incidence of the adverse reactions of the placebo group and the vaccination group was compared. Heterogeneity and publication bias were taken care of by meta-regression and sub-group analyses. Results: A total of 13 articles were included, with 81 287 subjects. Compared with the placebo group, the vaccination group showed a higher combined risk ratio (RR) of total adverse reactions (RR=1.67, 95% CI: 1.46-1.91, P<0.01), local adverse reactions (RR=2.86, 95% CI: 2.11-3.87, P<0.01), systemic adverse reactions (RR=1.25, 95% CI: 0.92-1.72, P=0.16), pain (RR=2.55, 95% CI: 1.75-3.70, P<0.01), swelling (RR=4.16, 95% CI: 1.71-10.17, P=0.002, fever (RR=2.34, 95% CI: 1.84-2.97, P<0.01), fatigue (RR=1.36, 95% CI: 1.32-1.41, P<0.01) and headache (RR=1.22, 95% CI: 1.18-1.26, P<0.01). The subgroup analysis showed the incidence of adverse reactions of the vaccination group after injection of the three COVID-19 vaccines (inactivated viral vaccines, mRNA vaccines and adenovirus vector vaccines) was higher than that of the placebo group, and the difference between the placebo group and the vaccination group in the mRNA vaccine subgroup and the adenovirus vector vaccine subgroup was statistically significant (P<0.01). The incidence of adverse reactions after injection of COVID-19 vaccine in subgroups of different ages was significantly higher than that in the placebo group (P<0.01). Conclusions: COVID-19 vaccines have a good safety, among which adenovirus vector vaccine has the highest incidence of adverse reactions. Both adolescents and adults vaccinated with novel coronavirus vaccine have a certain proportion of adverse reactions, but the symptoms are mild and can be relieved by themselves. Our meta-analysis can help boost global awareness of vaccine safety, promote mass vaccination, help build regional and global immune barriers and effectively curb the recurrency of COVID-19.

Using Collective Wisdom to Enhance Experimental Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The rapid escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic hit all educational institutions unprepared in Spring 2020 semester. Many schools had to pivot to online instruction with little preparation and minimal response time. The summer of 2020, while most universities offered few courses, was the time for faculty to regather resources and prepare for the fall semester. Many anticipated the likelihood of teaching online again and saw challenges associated with this instructional modality, especially for laboratory courses. A group of enthusiastic and experienced faculty members in the College of Engineering and Technology (CET) at East Carolina University congregated and started a weekly Faculty Connection Hour (FCH) to network and share pedagogical ideas for remote teaching. Many of these sessions focused on innovative ways to provide remote laboratory learning experiences comparable to their conventional face-to-face alternatives. A large number of faculty members contributed to and benefited from these discussions. The FCH started with identifying some challenges of laboratory learning with remote instruction. The group was able to discover fifteen strategies that can potentially facilitate the adaptation of laboratory learning to online instruction. The group also recognized that, although there may not be a single strategy that can resolve all issues existing in a course, laboratory learning objectives can often be achieved by using a combination of different strategies. Collective wisdom gathered from FCH discussions seemed to have equipped faculty with pedagogical ideas for the pivoting. Equally importantly, the connection built through these virtual meetings helped isolated faculty to recognize that they were not fighting the hardships alone;instead all members shared the same adversities. In a sense, it reduced stress and allowed faculty time to reset and unwind. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

The clinical application of a traditional Chinese medicine prescription issued by Professor Liangduo Jiang in the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Objective: To summarize the clinical experience of Professor Liangduo Jiang in the prevention and control of the new coronavirus disease COVID-19. Methods: Between January 2020 and February 2020, 87 subjects who have had contact with patients tested positive for COVID-19 in an isolated observation site in Tianjin were given the Chinese medicine prescription for prevention prescribed by Professor Liangduo Jiang continuously for three days. Their basic information, clinical manifestations and medication adherence were statistically analyzed, and the clinical manifestations, temperature changes and infection status after medication were summarized. Results: After the 14-day isolation observation period, only one patient who had close contact with confirmed patients developed a positive test for COVID-19 after taking the preventive Chinese medicine prescription, with the infection rate of 1.149%. Conclusion: The preventive treatment by Professor Liangduo Jiang is effective in the prevention and control of the epidemic.

Erratum: The clinical application of a traditional Chinese medicine prescription issued by Professor Liangduo Jiang in the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Traditional Medicine and Modern Medicine (2020) 3:1 (65-69) DOI: 10.1142/S2575900020500032)

The affiliations 2–4 have been corrected. The second affiliation should be “Beijing University of Chinese Medicine”, and the third and fourth affiliations should be “Dongfang Hospital, Second Affiliated Hospital of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine” and “Dongzhimen Hospital, First Affiliated Hospital of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine”, respectively.