ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a natural global epidemiological experiment unique to our century and a massive shock to older adults and to systems that care for them. There was a lack of a global unified plan to mitigate and control the spread of COVID-19. Several middle-or-high income nations struggled to control the viral spread resulting in increased mortality due to a combination of lack of public health measures and existing disparities which were magnified during the pandemic. The purpose of this review by a team of international experts is to (1) to examine reasons for the varied COVID-19 responses within U.S. and among other middle-or-high-income countries and the emergence of variants and vaccine inequities, and (2) to examine the country specific burden of cultural/structural/political determinants on access to care and mortality among older adults in various settings.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel SARS-Coronavirus-2 (n-SARS-CoV-2) has impacted people's lives in unprecedented ways. During the time of the pandemic, social vloggers have used social media to actively share their opinions or experiences in quarantine. This paper collected videos from YouTube to track emotional responses in conversational vlogs and their potential associations with events related to the pandemic. In particular, vlogs uploaded from locations in New York City were analyzed given that this was one of the first epicenters of the pandemic in the United States. We observed some common patterns in vloggers' acoustic and linguistic features across the time span of the quarantine, which is indicative of changes in emotional reactivity. Additionally, we investigated fluctuations of acoustic and linguistic patterns in relation to COVID-19 events in the New York area (e.g.The number of daily new cases, number of deaths, and extension of stay-At-home order and state of emergency). Our results indicate that acoustic features, such as zero-crossing-rate, jitter, and shimmer, can be valuable for analyzing emotional reactivity in social media videos. Our findings further indicate that some of the peaks of the acoustic and linguistic indices align with COVID-19 events, such as the peak in the number of deaths and emergency declaration. © 2020 ACM.