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COVID-2019 has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization due to the global spread of 2019-nCOV at an exponential rate (WHO). Scientists have hypothesized the reduction in transmission rate at warm and humid environment whereas facilitate rapid transmission at cold and dry environment. Hence in this work, we examine the combined impact of environmental and demographic factors along with the implementation of lockdown by the Government of India on the transmission rate of 2019-nCoV. Our analyses indicated a lower mortality rate in spite of higher population density in India compared to other countries and lower exponential growth factor after lockdown compared to before lockdown. The containment of transmission and mortality rate may be attributed to the favorable environment and median population age, respectively. Even though, to significantly reduce the outbreak, individuals, the media, and healthcare organizations are necessary to work together. © 2023 Author(s).
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Purpose: The research on consumerism has been dramatically rising in recent decades. However, in the food industry, little research has been empirically conducted in the beverage industry. This research empirically tests the consequences of consumer perceptions: perceived price (PPR), perceived quality (PQ), perceived packaging (PPG) and perceived taste (PT) on repurchase intention (RI) particularly;it unveils the consumer attributes, e.g. gender, age and ethnicity between consumer perceptions and RI of the consumers. Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected from 403 consumers of the beverage industry (e.g. Nestle, Mitchell's Fruit Farms, Murree Brewery and OMORE) in Pakistan. The researchers used online survey questionnaires followed by a cross-sectional approach because data collection physically was not possible due to COVID-19. Findings: Data were analyzed by Smart partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) 3.3.3, and the results supported the significant influence of consumer perceptions separately, e.g. PPR, PQ, PPG and PT on RI. Additionally, gender, age and ethnicity were found to have a moderating role between consumer perceptions and RI, so, the truth of having consumer attributes has been revealed. Practical implications: The managers of beverage industries should provide ethical and operational strategies to tackle consumer's problems based on cultural norms. Furthermore, they should make sensible measures for the quality branding of the beverage products. In this way, the consumers will have a better experience of quality, price, taste and packaging, in turn, to RI. Originality/value: This research targeted the beverage industry that needs facts and figures based on consumer attributes, e.g. age, gender and ethnicity. This research also disclosed the behaviors of consumers according to their gender, age and area of residence. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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The recent SARS-COV-2 virus, also known as COVID-19, badly affected the world's healthcare system due to limited medical resources for a large number of infected human beings. Quarantine helps in breaking the spread of the virus for such communicable diseases. This work proposes a nonwearable/contactless system for human location and activity recognition using ubiquitous wireless signals. The proposed method utilizes the channel state information (CSI) of the wireless signals recorded through a low-cost device for estimating the location and activity of the person under quarantine. We propose to utilize a Siamese architecture with combined one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1-D-CNNs) and bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) networks. The proposed method provides high accuracy for the joint task and is validated on two real-world testbeds, first, using the designed low-cost CSI recording hardware, and second, on a public dataset for joint activity and location estimation. The human activity recognition (HAR) results outperform state-of-the-art machine and deep learning methods, and localization results are comparable with the existing methods. © 2001-2012 IEEE.
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A growing number of people are using tweets about the recent coronavirus epidemic of COVID-19 as a dataset to determine how worried people are in different parts of the world. This study attempts to uncover the key sentiments expressed by Twitter users regarding the COVID-19 epidemic by categorizing the tweets into positive and negative sentiments utilizing several resources (such as the Twitter search application programming interface (API), the Tweepy Python library, and the CSV excel database), as well as some predefined search terms ('#LockdownPakistan.'). We extracted the text of English language tweets from 28th March-1st May 2020. We have performed the sentiment analysis and classified the tweets in a binary class of positive and negative. Further, we used the word frequencies of single (unigrams), double (bigrams), and three words to examine the gathered tweets (tri-grams). According to our data, the majority of tweets express a positive attitude, with the word for lockdown COVID-19 appearing frequently. When looking at frequency analysis, the word 'family and time' stood out among the other words, which suggests that tweets were mostly optimistic and sentiments of defeating SARS-COV-2 prevail. People are determined to spend the lockdown in a good way. However, a few of the negative tweets, nevertheless, should serve as a warning for healthcare officials to make appropriate arrangements. Public health crisis responses are today complicated and highly synchronized both offline and online. Social media is a significant medium that gives people the chance to communicate with healthcare authorities directly. © 2022 IEEE.
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The recent SARS-COV-2 virus, also known as COVID-19, badly affected the world’s healthcare system due to limited medical resources for a large number of infected human beings. Quarantine helps in breaking the spread of the virus for such communicable diseases. This work proposes a non-wearable/contactless system for human location and activity recognition using ubiquitous wireless signals. The proposed method utilizes the Channel State Information (CSI) of the wireless signals recorded through a low-cost device for estimating the location and activity of the person under quarantine. We propose to utilize a Siamese architecture with combined one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNN) and Bi-directional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) networks. The proposed method provides high accuracy for the joint task and is validated on two real-world testbeds. First, using the designed low-cost CSI recording hardware, and second, on a public dataset for joint activity and location estimation. The HAR results outperform state-of-the-art machine and deep learning methods, and localization results are comparable with the existing methods. IEEE
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Background/Aim: After the rapid spread of the COVID 19 when it first started in December 2019, the omicron wave of the infection started to rise again in November 2021. During this time Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came up with a comprehensive plan in place which allowed dentists to treat patients safely. Due to the fear of contraction of the virus and its easy transmissibility, it begs to reason that dental practitioners should modify the clinical practice to ensure optimal cross infection control. Methods: Our sample size consisted of 290 respondents from all over Pakistan, all of whom were dental practitioners using a standardized questionnaire. The data were analyzed using SPSS V.23. Frequencies were calculated & the Mann-Whitney u-test of significance was applied to the responses. Results: It was seen that out of the 290 respondents, 79% of the total respondents were anxious about treating patients with suspicious signs and symptoms of COVID-19 and 81% of the respondents were afraid of carrying the infection back to their families. On the other hand, only 49% of the respondents said that they use N95 respirators while treating patients, 28% of the respondents said that they were using rubber dams for aerosol-generating procedures and 49% said that they would perform 4 to 6 handed dentistry. Conclusion: There was a lack of adherence to the CDC proposed guidelines by the majority of the respondents despite having fear regarding the transmissibility of the disease.
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COVID-19 has impacted the world socio-economically. Unemployment, poverty, social stigma, social isolation, domestic violence and mental illnesses are the notable social issues related to COVID-19 pandemic. Framed under a review based approach, the current study searches for the link between COVID-19 pandemic and an increased vulnerability to suicide across the globe. Linking the current situation with researched determinants of suicide shows that COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating various socio-economic and psychological causes of suicide. In near future or even during the pandemic, suicide will be a key challenge for the public health sector across the globe. Besides, future research suggestions are given in light of the discussion in order to provide an impetus to researching the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicide.
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The COVID-19 pandemic came with a flux of new words, terminologies, and phrases, which led to the rapid coinage or neologisms in the world’s different languages. These lexical innovations may take place within one language as well as with the combination of two different languages. Therefore, this paper scrutinizes coroneologisms and word-formation processes in Hindi-English code-mixed words. Such a phenomenon happened due to the acceptance of English by Indians besides their mother tongue which makes them bilingual. The data were gathered from newspapers, blogs, social media, TV news, etc. Next, the linguistic analysis of the data revealed different types of word classes in Hindi-English codemixed words such as compounding, affixation, blending, and reduplication. Out of these, compounding and borrowing were reported as the most productive types of coroneologisms in Hindi-English code-mixed words. © 2022
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Background: The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc throughout the world, with 150 million cases to date and over 3 million lives claimed worldwide. Aim: To explored the difference in levels of SaO2 of COVID-19 positive patients with and without COPD. Study design: Experimental Study. Methodology: From May2020 to 2021 patients admitted at Aziz Bhatti Shaheed hospital were included in this studies. COVID- 19 was confirmed by RT-PCR.COPD was confirmed by using GOLD standard of diagnostic criteria. SaO2 was measured by using pulse oximeter and confirmed by blood samples measurement of SaO2. Statistical analysis: SPSS version 22 was used for data analysis. Paired sample t test was performed to evaluate the hypoxia levels between three pairs among the time distribution of 1st, 3rd, and 6th, day. Results: Levels of SaO2 were statistically significant between COVID-19 positive patients and COVID-19 positive patients with COPD. We calculated the levels of SaO2 at day1, 3rd, and 6th day and results were significant to show that COPD might be having some protective effect against hypoxia and that might be due to use of medications or adaptation of pulmonary cells. Conclusion: It was concluded that levels of SaO2 was significantly reduced in COVID-19 patients without COPD in comparison to patients without COPD.
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A novel virus is discovered recently, named as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). It causes the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is spreading rapidly worldwide. The emerging genetics and clinical evidence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus suggest a similar path to those of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Coronavirus causes respiratory illness in humans and infect several other species of animals. It was one of the best interests of researchers as it attracted virologist's attention in last two decades. It was clear from an epidemic in 2002-2003 of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) that human civilization may have animal coronavirus as its potential threat in the future. However, the mechanism of this virus spreading from one specie to another remained obscure these years. The 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) epidemic of animals, and now this COVID-19 pandemic prioritizes the human coronavirus for further research and exploration. However, General hygiene, social distancing, and disinfection can prevent the person-to-person spread of coronavirus. This review focuses on SARS-CoV-2, which is emerged from China in December 2019 and caused a novel disease named as COVID-19. The current review has an insight to possible treatment COVID-19 followed by a short review of In silico candidate drug design and prevention;This systematic review was conducted according to PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) guidelines. Databases, including Health Research and Development Information network Plus (HERDIN Plus), Science direct, PubMed and google scholar were visited to search the articles. Further, the forecasting results of the fitted model show a significant decrease in the weekly global deaths from the 51th week of 2020 16th week of 2021 but 95% limit has also shown the potential of getting the situation worser amid COVID-19 second wave.
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BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in the use of telehealth visits across the country to minimize in-person visits and to limit the spread of COVID-19. To date, no standards or outlines for telehealth spine examinations have been detailed and many surgeons simply defer the physical examination when performing telehealth visits. Nevertheless, just as physical examination of the spine is an integral part of live clinical encounters, appropriately modified physical examinations should also be part of virtual visits. METHODS: In this study we provide our methodology for guiding providers and patients in efficiently performing telehealth spine examinations. RESULTS: The study details steps for efficiently performing a physical examination in the telehealth setting. Our written suggestions are supplemented with photographs and video recordings to help streamline the virtual examination. CONCLUSIONS: An effective and efficient spine physical examination can be performed during telehealth visits. Future directions include verifying the findings from our virtual physical examination with in-person examinations.