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Innovation is the soul of a nation’s progress and the inexhaustible driving force for a country’s prosperity. Cultivating students’ innovative abilities is an inevitable requirement for China to rejuvenate the country through science and education and build an innovative country, and it is also an important goal of the current education reform. In the internet era and the background of global epidemic prevention, the blended teaching model integrating online and offline will become a new normal mode. By comparing the advantages and disadvantages of online teaching and 8 traditional offline teachings, this paper discusses how to make full use of the online and offline blended teaching modes to better promote the cultivation of students’ ability for creative idea generation .
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People living with HIV (PLWH), if infected with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), had an increased risk of mortality compared to people without HIV infection. They are considered as a priority group to receive COVID-19 vaccination. This cross-sectional online survey investigated the prevalence of and factors associated with COVID-19 vaccination uptake among 2740 PLWH aged 18–65 years in eight Chinese metropolitan cities between January and February 2021. As validated by requesting participants to send an image of receipt hiding personal identification, 6.2% of PLWH had taken up COVID-19 vaccination. Participants living in cities where individuals could make an appointment to receive COVID-19 vaccination reported significantly higher uptake than those living in cities without such allowance (11.0 vs. 2.9%, p < 0.001). Being a member of priority groups to receive vaccination, concerning about the side effects of COVID-19 vaccination and its interaction with HIV treatment, and exposing to information on the Internet/social media supporting PLWH to receive COVID-19 vaccination were significantly associated with COVID-19 vaccination uptake in both groups of participants. Receiving advice from the staff of community-based organizations supporting COVID-19 vaccination was associated with higher uptake among participants living in cities where individuals could make an appointment to receive such vaccination, while a shortage in COVID-19 vaccine supply was associated with a lower uptake among participants living in other cities. Our findings presented a snapshot of COVID-19 vaccination uptake among PLWH in the early phase of vaccine rollout in China. It provided a knowledge basis to formulate interventions promoting COVID-19 vaccination for PLWH.
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The emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs) exhibit enhanced transmission and immune escape, reducing the efficacy and effectiveness of the two FDA-approved mRNA vaccines currently in use. Here, we explored various strategies to develop mRNA vaccines that offer potentially safer and wider coverage of VOCs. The initial mouse vaccination results showed that the individual VOC mRNAs carrying furin cleavage mutation induced the generation of neutralizing antibody in a VOC-specific manner. Moreover, we discovered that the antibodies produced from mice immunized with Beta-Furin and Washington (WA)-Furin mRNAs cross-reacted with other VOCs. The broad spectrum of generated nAb was further confirmed when vaccinated mice were challenged with the respective live viruses. However, neither WA-Furin nor Beta-Furin mRNA elicited potent neutralizing activity against the omicron variant. Interestingly, in a mix-and-match booster experiment, omicron-Furin and WA-Furin mRNA elicited comparable protection against omicron. Finally, we tested the concept of bivalent vaccine by introducing the RBD of Delta strain into the intact S antigen of Omicron. The chimeric mRNA induces potent and broadly acting nAb against Omicron and Delta, which paves the way to develop vaccine candidate to target emerging variants in the future.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE Human metapneumovirus（h MPV） is semblable to respiratory syncytial virus（RSV） which causes respiratory infections typically characterized by cough, runny nose, fever, and nasal congestion but sometimes progressing to bronchiolitis and pneumonia. Whereas, there is no corresponding drug to inhabit the virus. Studies of new compounds with potential anti-HMPV activity could produce clinical value. Chinese herbal medicine played a great role during COVID-19, therefore we choose some small molecular（JH001） extracted from botany to investigate therapeutic effect on h MPV and the underlying mechanisms. METHODS In this study, 16 HBE cells were used as a model to explore in vitro antiviral effect. Cytotoxicity assays were performed before the antiviral tests, cell viability of 16 HBE cells handled by different concentration of JH001 was estimated by Cell Counting Kit-8（CCK-8）. Then RT-q PCR, immunofluorescence, and flow cytometer were used to test the viral titer after cells infected with h MPV. Eventually, 6-8 weeks mice were infected intranasally with 60 μL of h MPV, the control group was treated with 0.9% saline water, other groups were administered with JH001 and ribavirin, then the lung virus titer and protective effect in lung were judged. RESULTS The obtained JH001 exhibited no cytotoxicity to 16 HBE cells during 6.25-200 μmol · L-1. RT-QPCR demonstrated that JH001 showed obvious inhabitation to the viral replication and showed great significance compared with saline. And fluorescence exhibited distinct decrease of h MPV-N protein, flow cytometer results showed that MFI decrease evidently. Significant reduction of N-gene expression was observed in those mice treated with JH001 compared with saline group,which indicated that JH001 probably had protective and therapeutic effect on viral replication. CONCLUSION This study illustrated that JH001 might be a promising option for small molecular against h MPV and JH001 might be worthy of further development and used as a potential therapeutic strategy for other respiratory viruses in the future.
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The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 affects our lives in all aspects. As of September 11, more than 28 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 infection, and more than 911,000 people have lost their lives in this virus battle. Some patients can not receive appropriate medical treatment due the limits of hospitalization volume and shortage of ICU beds. An estimated future hospitalization is critical so that medical resources can be allocated as needed. In this study, we propose to use 4 recurrent neural networks to infer hospitalization change for the following week compared with the current week. Results show that sequence to sequence model with attention achieves a high accuracy of 0.938 and AUC of 0.850 in the hospitalization prediction. Our work has the potential to predict the hospitalization need and send a warning to medical providers and other stakeholders when a re-surge initializes.
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COVID-19ABSTRACT
Background: As a new infectious disease, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is not fully understood. During January - July 2020, there were two clusters infections in Beijing, China. This study was to analyze the features of the two COVID-19 infections in Beijing.Methods: In this retrospective single-center study, 89 cases with the positive novel coronavirus nucleic acid test were collected from January to July 2020 in Beijing. They were divided into January-March group and June-July group. Two groups of data were compared.Results: The eighty-nine cases, 47 males and 42 females, mean age (41±14 years), were used for our study. The most common symptoms were fever (46/89, 52%) and cough (34/89, 38%). The clinical classification were moderate type (56/89,63%), mild type (24/89, 27%), severe type (4/89, 4%), critical type (0), respectively. Ground glass opacity (GGO) (47%) was the majority CT pattern. The frequency of involvement of lower lobe was higher than that of upper lobe (P＜0.01). In January - March group, there were 5 patients (18%) exposure to Wuhan, 15 patients (54%) family clusters, 5 patients (18%) colleague clusters, 3 patients (11%) imported cases. In June-July group, 41 patients (68%) had an exposure to Xinfadi market of Beijing, 6 patients (10%) family clusters, and 14 patients (23%) colleague clusters. The number of patients with fever, cough, chest CT severity score and the number of lesion lung lobes in January-March group was higher than that in June-July group (P＜0.05).Conclusions: Two COVID-19 clusters were dominated moderate and mild type, but few severe types. Patients in June-July group had less symptoms, imaging and family clusters than that in January-March group. This suggested that closely monitoring, early quarantined, nucleic acid test of COVID-19 and chest CT were important measures to prevent epidemic.
Subject(s)
Lung Diseases , Fever , Cough , Communicable Diseases , COVID-19 , Cluster HeadacheABSTRACT
SARS-Cov-2, the deadly and novel virus, which has caused a worldwide pandemic and drastic loss of human lives and economic activities. An open data set called the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset or CORD-19 contains large set full text scientific literature on SARS-CoV-2. The Next Strain consists of a database of SARS-CoV-2 viral genomes from since 12/3/2019. We applied an unique information mining method named lexical link analysis (LLA) to answer the call to action and help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to SARS-CoV-2. We first text-mined the CORD-19. We also data-mined the next strain database. Finally, we linked two databases. The linked databases and information can be used to discover the insights and help the research community to address high-priority questions related to the SARS-CoV-2s genetics, tests, and prevention. Significance StatementIn this paper, we show how to apply an unique information mining method lexical link analysis (LLA) to link unstructured (CORD-19) and structured (Next Strain) data sets to relevant publications, integrate text and data mining into a single platform to discover the insights that can be visualized, and validated to answer the high-priority questions of genetics, incubation, treatment, symptoms, and prevention of COVID-19.
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COVID-19ABSTRACT
Objective@#To describe the epidemiological characteristics of a cluster of COVID-19 cases reported in Baodi district of Tianjin as of 18 February, 2020, which might be associated with the exposure in a local department store, and provide suggestions for prevention and control strategy development.@* Methods@#The basic characteristics, time and area distributions, clinical manifestations, epidemiological history and transmission mode of the COVID-19 cases associated with the department store exposure were analyzed.@* Results@#A total of 40 COVID-19 cases were associated with the department store exposure, accounting for 75.47% of the total confirmed cases (53 cases) reported in Baodi district. The cases were mainly at the age of 60 years or older (35.00%) and farmers (40.00%). The main clinical manifestations included fever (95.00%), cough (35.00%), and diarrhea (15.00%). The proportion of confirmed severe cases was 32.50%. The incidence curve showed that the incidence peak occurred on 31 January, 2020. Among the 40 cases, 6(15.00%) were department store employees, 19(47.50%) were customers and 15(37.50%) were close contacts (secondary cases). The first case occurred on 21 January, 2020, this case was a department store employee who had a purchasing history at whole sale markets in other provinces and cities before the onset, and 3 employees were still on duty after symptom onsets. The median of the incubation period of customer cases was 6 days, and the median of the interval between onset and medical treatment of customer cases was 7 days.@* Conclusion@#This was a cluster epidemic of COVID-19, which might be associated with the exposure in the department store. By now, the current prevention and control measures have achieved satisfied effects.
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3CLpro is the main protease of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) responsible for their intracellular duplication. Based on virtual screening technology, we found 23 approved clinical drugs such as Carfilzomib, Saquinavir, Thymopentin and etc., which showed high affinity with the 3CLpro active sites. These findings suggest that 3CLpro inhibitors might be potential candidates for further activity detection and molecular modification.
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Background: Since December, 2019, the 2019 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from Wuhan, China, has caused worldwide outbreak with more than 200,000 people infected and thousands of deaths. The clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients in non-Wuhan areas of Hubei province have not been described. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the clinical characteristics and treatment progress of 91 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in Jingzhou Central Hospital. Results: Of the 91 patients diagnosed with COVID-19, 30 (33.0%) cases were severe and two (2.2%) patients died. The severe patients tended to be older (50.5 vs 42.0, P=0.049), and have more chronic disease (40% vs 14.75%, P=0.009), compared to mild group. Only 73.6% of the patients were quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) positive on their first tests, while typical chest computed tomographic (CT) images were obtained for each patient. The most common complaints were cough (75, 82.4%), fever (59, 64.8%), fatigue (35, 38.5%), and diarrhea (14, 15.4%). Non-respiratory injur y was identified by elevated levels of aspartate aminotransferase (18, 19.8%), creatinine (5, 5.5%) and creatine kinase (14, 15.4%) in laboratory tests. In sum, 28 (30.8%) cases suffered non-respiratory injury, including 50% of the critically ill patients and 21.3% of the mild patients. Conclusions: Overall, the mortality rate of patients in Jingzhou is lower than that of Wuhan. Importantly, we discovered liver, kidney, digestive tract and heart injury in COVID-19 cases besides respiratory problems. Combining Chest CT images with qPCR of throat swab samples would improve the accuracy of COVID-19 diagnose.