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Background & Aim: The long-term effects of human mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) treatment on COVID-19 patients have not been fully characterized. The aim of this study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a MSC treatment administered to severe COVID-19 patients enrolled in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial (NCT 04288102). Methods, Results & Conclusion(s): A total of 100 patients experiencing severe COVID-19 received either MSC treatment (n = 65, 4x107 cells per infusion) or a placebo (n = 35) combined with standard of care on days 0, 3, and 6. Patients were subsequently evaluated 18 and 24 months after treatment to evaluate the long-term safety and efficacy of the MSC treatment. The outcomes measured included: 6-minute walking distance (6-MWD), lung imaging, quality of life according to the Short Form 36 questionnaire, COVID-19-related symptoms, titers of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, MSC-related adverse events (AEs), and tumor markers. Two years after treatment, a marginally smaller proportion of patients had a 6-MWD below the lower limit of the normal range in the MSC group than in the placebo group (OR = 0.19, 95% CI: 0.04-0.80, Fisher's exact test, p = 0.015). On the SF-36 questionnaire, a marginally higher general health score was received by the MSC group at month 18 compared with the placebo group (50.00 vs. 35.00;95% CI: 0.00-20.00, Wilcoxon rank sum test, p = 0.016). In contrast, there were no differences in the total severity score of lung imaging or the titer of neutralizing antibodies between the two groups. Meanwhile, there were no MSC-related AEs reported at the 18- or 24-month follow-ups. The serum levels of most of the tumor markers examined remained within normal ranges and were similar between the MSC and placebo groups. Long-term safety was observed for the COVID-19 patients who received MSC treatment. Yet few sustained efficacy of MSC treatment was observed at the end of the 2-year follow-up period. Funding(s): The National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFA1105604, 2020YFC0860900), the specific research fund of The Innovation Platform for Academicians of Hainan Province (YSPTZX202216) and the Fund of National Clinical Center for Infectious Diseases, PLA General Hospital (NCRCID202105,413FZT6). [Figure presented]Copyright © 2023 International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy
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The multiple comparison method refers to the hypothesis test of whether there is a significant difference between the means of each sample after the analysis of variance is performed on the samples of each group to be tested. In data analysis, the multiple comparison method can perform a more precise difference analysis based on the analysis of variance. Therefore, this study will select the LSD (Least significant difference) test method in the multiple comparison method to analyze the physical fitness test scores of males and females in the three grades from 2019 to 2021 in the investigated schools. In this way, we can understand the substantial impact of students' home-based learning on students' physical health during the new crown epidemic, so as to make targeted development plans for students' physical health in the current special period, and minimize the adverse impact of the new crown epidemic on students' physical health. © 2023 SPIE.
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Background China has made some achievements in the construction of hierarchical medical system，but the development of its primary healthcare settings is still relatively slow. Objective To analyze the changes in patient visits and associated determinants in primary healthcare settings in Guangdong during 2013 to 2020，providing a basis for deepening the construction of hierarchical medical system. Methods In December 2021，this study extracted patient visits in primary healthcare institutions of Guangdong from Guangdong Health Statistics Yearbook（2013—2015），Guangdong Health and Family Planning Statistical Yearbook（2016—2017），and Guangdong's Hygiene and Health Statistical Yearbook（2018—2020） as the reference sequence，and extracted the population data and per capita disposable income from Guangdong Statistical Yearbook 2021，and the financial subsidy for primary healthcare institutions and the number of medical insurance participants from China Health and Family Planning Statistical Yearbook（2015—2017） and China's Hygiene and Health Statistical Yearbook（2018—2021） as the comparative sequence. Grey relational analysis was used to evaluate the strength of correlation between the number of patient visits and its potential associated determinants involving demographic and socioeconomic status，health resource allocation and medical insurance participation. Results The number of hospital visits in Guangdong increased from 334.592 million in 2013 to 401.317 million in 2019，with an average annual growth of 3.08%. The number of patient visits in primary healthcare settings in the province reached 437.317 million in 2019，and the average annual growth in these settings was 2.10% during 2013 to 2019. In 2020，the number of patient visits in hospitals and in primary healthcare settings both decreased significantly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of patients visits in primary healthcare settings accounted for 50.7% of all patients visits in medical institutions in 2013，which declined to 48.1% in 2020. Grey relational analysis showed that both the number of residents（r=0.913） and the number of people aged over 65 years old（r=0.913） had the strongest correlation with the number of patient visits in primary healthcare settings，followed by the number of urban-rural resident basic medical insurance participants（r=0.899），the number of beds in primary healthcare settings（r=0.893），the number of primary healthcare settings（r=0.886） and the number of urban employee basic medical insurance participants（r=0.872）. Conclusion At present，many patients still choose to hospitals for medical services，which calls for actions to strengthen the first contact in primary care system. It is suggested to meet the needs of residents for nearby medical treatment by enriching the connotation of primary care services，widening the gap of healthcare expenses reimbursed by medical insurance among medical institutions and improving the service capacity of primary healthcare settings under the background of population aging. © 2023 Chinese General Practice. All rights reserved.
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Objective To ensure the safety of both doctors and patients，we should strengthen the management of infection control in the medical observation isolation area for overseas tourists，and continuously improve the compliance rate of infection control prevention measures. Methods In Mar 2020，the domestic COVID-19 was under control，however the overseas epidemic began to spread. As a designated screening hospital for overseas tourists，to prevent the occurrence of nosocomial infections caused by imported cases from abroad，the department carried out quality control prevention circle activities with the theme of"improving the compliance rate of infection control and prevention measures for staff in the medical observation and isolation area of overseas passengers”and determined four countermeasures implementation plans based on current situation grasp，goal setting，cause analysis and countermeasure formulation. Results Compared before and after the implementation of QCC，the compliance rate of the prevention measures of the staff in the medical observation and quarantine area for overseas passengers was increased from 45.08% to 91.54%，and the difference was statistically significant（P<0.001）.The target achievement rate was 84.43%，and the progress rate was 108.85%. Conclusion The quality control circle activities can improve the compliance rate of infection control and prevention measures for staff in the medical observation quarantine area for overseas tourists，thereby ensuring the safety of patients and staff. © 2022 Fudan University. All rights reserved.
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Objective To ensure the safety of both doctors and patients，we should strengthen the management of infection control in the medical observation isolation area for overseas tourists，and continuously improve the compliance rate of infection control prevention measures. Methods In Mar 2020，the domestic COVID-19 was under control，however the overseas epidemic began to spread. As a designated screening hospital for overseas tourists，to prevent the occurrence of nosocomial infections caused by imported cases from abroad，the department carried out quality control prevention circle activities with the theme of"improving the compliance rate of infection control and prevention measures for staff in the medical observation and isolation area of overseas passengers”and determined four countermeasures implementation plans based on current situation grasp，goal setting，cause analysis and countermeasure formulation. Results Compared before and after the implementation of QCC，the compliance rate of the prevention measures of the staff in the medical observation and quarantine area for overseas passengers was increased from 45.08% to 91.54%，and the difference was statistically significant（P<0.001）.The target achievement rate was 84.43%，and the progress rate was 108.85%. Conclusion The quality control circle activities can improve the compliance rate of infection control and prevention measures for staff in the medical observation quarantine area for overseas tourists，thereby ensuring the safety of patients and staff. © 2022 Fudan University. All rights reserved.
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In the fight against COVID-19, many robots replace human employees in various tasks that involve a risk of infection. Among these tasks, the fundamental problem of navigating robots among crowds, named robot crowd navigation, remains open and challenging. Therefore, we propose HGAT-DRL, a heterogeneous GAT-based deep reinforcement learning algorithm. This algorithm encodes the constrained human-robot-coexisting environment in a heterogeneous graph consisting of four types of nodes. It also constructs an interactive agent-level representation for objects surrounding the robot, and incorporates the kinodynamic constraints from the non-holonomic motion model into the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm achieves a success rate of 92%, at least 6% higher than four baseline algorithms. Furthermore, the hardware experiment on a Fetch robot demonstrates our algorithm’s successful and convenient migration to real robots. IEEE
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A mixed antigen coating method was designed to optimize the method for detecting the titer of the immune serum to inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, which based on the traditional single antigen coating.The authors determined the optimal coating concentration of the single antigen first by the checkerboard method, then combined two kinds of antigen and obtained coating concentration of the mixed antigen.The best combination of mixed coating antigen contains the whole-coronavirus antigen with total protein concentration of 25 ng/well and the recombinant new coro-navirus S1 protein antigen with protein concentration of 50 ng/well.This method can be used to detect all antibody-specific titers in serum effectively, especially serum containing high-level S protein-specific antibodies.
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Malaysia has a nationwide COVID-19 vaccination programme to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical students must help provide information about COVID-19 vaccination to the public. This study assessed the knowledge, attitude, and hesitancy towards COVID-19 vaccination among medical students. An online-based study was conducted involving 156 medical students at a local private university. Sociodemographic characteristics, knowledge, attitude, and vaccination hesitancy were collected. Vaccine hesitancy was considered in respondents who were not registered yet for COVID-19 vaccination and based on the uncertainty of their likelihood to register in future. Our research findings highlighted that insufficient knowledge and negative attitude may lead to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy/refusal. 25% of our study population who were COVID-19 vaccine hesitant/refusal demonstrated insufficient knowledge (69.2%) and negative attitude (64.1%) towards COVID-19 vaccination. Nevertheless, 75% of the students have registered for COVID-19 vaccination, and most of them have good knowledge (59.8%) and showed positive attitude (58.1%) towards COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccination educational programmes focused on improving knowledge and cultivating positive attitude, should be conducted to maximise vaccine acceptance among medical students. © 2021. All Rights Reserved.
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Aim: To develop a nursing early warning system in children's hospital during the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pneumonia, and to accomplish the construction and application of this system, so as to provide decision-support of the prevention and control for COVID-19 in children's medical institutions. Method: Children's hospital nursing early warning system was divided into three modules: hospital nursing early warning platform includes internal and external early warning platform, nursing staff early warning program includes protection, human resources early warning plan and patient early warning program includes outpatient, emergency and ward early warning plan. The data of epidemic training, assessment, prevention and control screening from January to June 2020 were collected from the nursing early warning system to evaluate the application effect of the system. Results: A total of 18 procedures and specifications were formulated, nine hospital-level trainings and about 1000 department-level trainings were organized, two hospital-level assessments (pass rate 95.6% and 98.2%), and 78 nurses were reserved, and 10 popular science articles, five popular science videos were published during the application of the nursing early warning system. A total of 583,435 children and 139,308 caregivers were screened in outpatient, emergency and wards during pre-checks, 2385 suspected cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia were confirmed (0.41%) after the screening and 1 case (0.0002%) was finally confirmed. Conclusion: The nursing early warning system of children's hospital can prevent and control the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic from each module, ensure early warning and triage of suspected infected patients, reduce the risk of cross-infection in hospital and improve the safety of the children's hospital medical environment.
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The policy response to the COVID-19 shock included regulatory easing across many jurisdictions to facilitate the flow of credit to the economy and mitigate a further amplification of the shock through tighter financial conditions. Using an intraday event study, this paper examines how stock prices - a key driver of financial conditions - reacted to regulatory easing announcements in a sample of 18 advanced economies and 8 emerging markets. It finds that regulatory easing announcements contributed to looser financial conditions but effects varied across sectors and tools. News about regulatory easing led to lower valuations for financial sector stocks, mainly in jurisdictions with relatively lower capital buffers. These results stand in stark contrast with valuations of non-financial sector stocks, which increased in response to regulatory relief announcements, particularly in industries that are more dependent on bank financing. The effects also differed across tools. Valuations declined and financial conditions tightened following announcements related to easier bank capital regulation while equity valuation rose and financial conditions loosened after those about liquidity regulation.
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Air pollution is an important topic on countless fronts and is an active area of research. The goal of this work is to provide a machine learning model for learning and inference of pollution concentrations and air quality measures, namely Particulate Matter 2.5, NO3, Nitrate Pollution, and NH4, Atmospheric Ammonium, with high granularity by using easily obtainable satellite imagery data. In order to achieve this, we propose the fully convolutional network U-net that, unlike previous work, can predict these pollutant values at a pixel-level high-resolution instead of being able only to predict a single value for an entire geographical region. We demonstrate that this approach can reconstruct the considered pollutant concentrations on ground-truth data and can predict the concentrations and their spatial structure reasonably well, even for data that the network has temporally not yet seen. Finally, we illustrate that the model's pollutant predictions can offer valuable insights into the current COVID-19 pandemic.
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Low-income older adults are more likely to face a digital divide due to the limited internet access and digital skills, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. While many studies in HCI have identified obstacles older adults encountered in technology use, little is known about the digital inequity that older adults experienced in adopting and using the tablet PC for the first time. In this study, we provided 28 low-income older adults with instruction sessions to help them set up and use tablet PCs. From these sessions, we found that while social connection as the most requested feature provides a positive experience, creating or managing a login account and being unfamiliar with common interaction techniques were challenging for older adults to use a tablet PC for the first time. We conclude with design implications for senior-friendly technology. © 2021 ACM.
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As the first mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in 2020, its great safety profile and high protection efficacy has been well demonstrated. As a result of its unique advantage in the mechanism of action, mRNA can effectively trigger strong humoral and cellular immune response. Of note, many other prophylactic or therapeutic mRNA vaccines developed for preventing different infectious diseases or treatment of cancer are under clinical trial investigations. mRNA-based protein supplementation and gene therapy also begin to emerge. There will be bigger stage for the development of mRNA technology-based products, posing a revolutionary effect in the field of biopharmaceuticals.
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Scientific, timely and effective health communication is crucial for stabilizing public emotions and taking effective prevention and control actions during the crisis of 2019-nCoV. This article uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and takes the health rumors list during the epidemic as a research sample to determine 6 specific explanatory condition variables and analyze the combination factors that affect the spread of high-health rumors in health. From the perspective of public opinion, including evolution mechanism, generation mechanism, and early warning mechanism, it aims to propose the perfection and solution of network public opinion governance mechanism under public health emergencies.
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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly worldwide and the number of confirmed cases and deaths is increasing rapidly. Approximately one quarter of patients infected with COVID-19 require ICU care, and among these patients, the mortality increases to 49%. Comparative clinical studies have demonstrated that severe and critical disease in patients with COVID-19 is associated with the time from the onset of symptoms to hospital admission. Similarly, an effective quarantine policy that isolates or hospital- izes diseased individuals as soon as possible, to limit their activity, is an important reason for the reduction in the rates of severe and critical disease in China. A number of patients with COVID-19 present mild symptoms at the early stages, while subsequently experiencing rapid deterioration with severe pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Before the virus invades the lungs and hypoxemia occurs, it is necessary to increase the oxygen supply, which enables the body to fight the virus. Lower oxygen reserves, which are influenced by factors, such as excess activity or changes in vital signs, can increase oxygen consumption, and shifts in the balance of oxygen supply and demand and can lead to critical illness and death. The present review article discusses whether early oxygen supplementation, and reducing the oxygen demand may result in a better prognosis of patients with COVID-19. © 2020 Spandidos Publications. All rights reserved.
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OBJECTIVE: To summarize and suggest experience and lessons proposed to promote the conjunctive development of education, so as to better play the role of pharmaceutical talents in responding to major public health emergencies. METHODS: Using expert method and literature method, online expert opinion consultation was conducted among experts from 50 pharmaceutical colleges and universities in China, and the analysis and research were carried out by combining expert opinions and literature content. RESULTS: The COVID-19 public health event sheds light on practical problems related to industry and education, including drug discovery and reserves existing weak links, pharmacists' clinical pharmacy practice ability insufficient, lack of the public health culture, as well as the pharmaceutical talents training system not conformed to the core principles of healthy China strategy, and pharmaceutical colleges and universities' activities of teaching and scientific research disconnected with innovation driven development strategy. CONCLUSION: The pharmaceutical colleges and universities should firmly establish a patient-centered talent training concept, strengthen the students' political and professional ethics qualities, continue to improve the pharmaceutical talents' knowledge structure, and deepen the collaborative innovation and cooperative education mechanism. Emphasis should be laid on continuously improving the quality of talents training and laying a solid foundation for national medical innovation in the long run.
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To Track the source of the infection through an investigation of a clustering of coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19), and provide scientific basis and Strategy for the effective control of the aggregated epidemic situation of COVID-19. Field epidemiological method was used to survey the cases and related close contacts in a family clustering epidemic of COVID-19 in Dandong city of Liaoning Province. We obtained survey data for a descriptive analysis.Real time RT-PCR technique was used to detect 2019-nCoV nucleic acid in samples collected from cases and related close contacts combined with serum specific antibody detection. A total of 3 confirmed cases and 2 asymptomatic infection cases were discovered in the clustering epidemic, with 34 close contacts.Of eight close family contacts visiting from other province, one patient was on the same flight as the confirmed case, and her antibody IgG was positive. The family clustering was caused by past infection case who visited her friend through Wuhan from other provinces to local area.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Epidemics , China/epidemiology , Cities , Female , Humans , Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
More and more clinical evidence shows that patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) died due to severe complications such as acute respiratory distress syndrome and multiple organ failure due to the aggravation of the disease in the later period, and the main cause of the aggravation is "cytokine storm". There is no specific drug for the treatment of severe COVID-19 patients. Although western medicine can improve some symptoms, it leaves a large sequela, while traditional Chinese medicine plays an important role in this outbreak. In this paper, based on the clinical reported cytokines storm-related indicators, the traditional Chinese medicine systems pharmacology database and analysis platform (TCMSP) was used to mine and screen the traditional Chinese medicines acting on these cytokines based on the theory of "damp toxin invading the lung". It was found that 19 cytokines, including interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα), granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and so on, were closely related to COVID-19, and 22 traditional Chinese medicines such as Ephedrae Herba, Glycyrrhizae Radix Et Rhizoma and Lonicerae Japonicae Flos acted on these cytokines, so as to provide certain reference for the reasonable choice of prescription and addition or modification of drugs for COVID-19 patients in the middle and late stage of Chinese medicine clinical treatment.