AUTOANTIBODIES RELATED TO RHEUMATIC DISEASES AFTER COVID-19 INFECTION

BackgroundSARS-CoV-2(Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) has been circulating worldwide for three years. It mainly causes upper respiratory tract infection, which can manifest as pulmonary infection and even respiratory distress syndrome in severe cases. Different autoantibodies can be detected in patients infected with COVID-19.ObjectivesTo explore autoantibodies related to rheumatic diseases after COVID-19 infection.MethodsNinety-eight inpatients were tested for antinuclear antibodies (ANA), antibodies to extractable nuclear antigens(ENA), anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies（ANCA), anticardiolipin antibodies,a-β2GPI (IgG/IgM). They were from a tertiary hospital in Guangzhou during the COVID-19 epidemic. Data were described statistically.ResultsNinety-eight hospitalized patients were tested for relevant antibodies. The average age was 50.64±19.54;67 (68.4%) were male, 64 (65.3%) were COVID-19 positive, 90 (90.9%) had rheumatic diseases, and 56 of them were COVID-19 positive patients with rheumatic diseases.There were 76 patients tested for antinuclear antibodies;29 （38.16%）were negative, 18 （23.68%）had a 1/80 titre, and 29（28.16%） had a titre greater than 1:80. The 31 covid patients were positive for ANA. In the high-titer group, 19 patients with rheumatic diseases were positive for COVID-19, and 12 patients had an exacerbation of the rheumatic diseases (6 of whom had previously had pulmonary fibrosis). Of 31 covid patients, only two were non-rheumatic patients, and both were elderly, aged 85 and 100, respectively.Fifty-six patients had ENA results, and 29 for positive antibodies, 8 for ds-DNA antibodies, 2 for anti-Sm antibodies, 6 for anti-nucleosome antibodies, 12 for anti-U1RNP antibodies, 2 for anti-Scl-70 antibodies, 12 for anti-SS-A antibodies, 3 for anti-mitochondrial M2 antibodies, 2 for anti-centromere antibodies, 1 for anti-Po antibodies, and one for anti-Jo-1 antibody. All 56 patients had rheumatic diseases, and no new patients were found.There were 62 patients with ANCA data. P-ANCA was positive in 12 cases(19.35%), and MPO-ANCA was positive in 2 cases. An 85-year-old non-rheumatic COVID-19 patient was P-ANCA positive. She had a history of hypertension, colon cancer, CKD3, coronary heart disease, and atrial flutter.In the anticardiolipin antibodies group, there were 62 patients;only 6 were positive, and 2 were rheumatic patients infected with COVID-19. Antiphospholipid antibodies were detected in 33 patients, and a-β2GPI was tested in one patient, an 82-year-old COVID-19 patient with gout, diabetes, and cerebral infarction in the past. We did not find a statistical difference in the above results.ConclusionWe have not found a correlation between SARS-CoV-2 and serum autoantibodies of rheumatic immune diseases. It needs large samples and an extended follow-up to research.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by Scientific and Technological Planning Project of Guangzhou City [202102020150], Guangdong Provincial Basic and Applied Basic Research Fund Project [2021A1515111172], National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Fund [82201998] and Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University Cultivating Special Fund Project for National Natural Science Foundation of China [2022GZRPYQN01].Disclosure of Interestsone declared.

Study on Infection Probabilities of COVID-19 by SIR Network

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Related Diseases (COVID-19) is now one of the most challenging and concerning epidemics, which has been affecting the world so much. After that, countries around the world have been actively developing vaccines to deal with the sudden disease. How to carry out more efficient epidemic prevention has also become a problem of our concern. Unlike traditional SIR disease transmission models, network percolation has unique advantages in disease immune modelling, which makes it closer to reality in the simulation. This article introduces the study of SIR percolation network on infection probabilities of COVID-19, and proposes a method to preventing the spread of disease. © 2022 IEEE.

Reflecting on Hybrid Events: Learning from a Year of Hybrid Experiences

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden shift to virtual work and events, with the last two years enabling an appropriated and rather simulated togetherness - the hybrid mode. As we return to in-person events, it is important to reflect on not only what we learned about technologies and social justice, but about the types of events we desire, and how to re-design them accordingly. This SIG aims to reflect on hybrid events and their execution: scaling them across sectors, communities, and industries;considering trade-offs when choosing technologies;studying best practices and defining measures of "success"for hybrid events;and finally, identifying and charting the wider social, ethical, and legal implications of hybrid formats. This SIG will consolidate these topics by inviting participants to collaboratively reflect on previous hybrid experiences and what can be learned from them. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Application of OMO Teaching Mode in Music Education in Colleges

With the development of COVID-19, more and more courses begin to be transferred to online teaching. The OMO teaching mode that focuses on offline teaching within a certain period of time and completes online teaching interaction at a later stage has become a trend. Based on the current teaching practice of music education in Colleges and universities, the paper combines teaching with Internet new media technology under the current environmental situation, realizes the new mode of offline and online joint teaching, realizes student-centered unlimited learning, completes the informatization and real-Time teaching, and improves the teaching results. © 2022 ACM.

Service supply chain resilience: a social-ecological perspective on last-mile delivery operations

Purpose: Considering the last-mile delivery service supply chain as a social-ecological system rather than just a firm-based service system, this research exploit the COVID-19 pandemic disruption to investigate how the supply chain develops resilience from a viewpoint that integrates a social-ecological perspective with the traditional engineering one. Design/methodology/approach: This research adopt a multi-case study approach using qualitative data collected via semi-structured interviews with executive-level managers from nine leading UK last-mile delivery companies. Data analysis is guided by a research framework which is developed by combining the social-ecological perspective with the structure–conduct–performance paradigm. This framework aids the investigation of the impacts of external challenges on companies' resilience strategies and practices, as well as performance, in response to disruptions. Findings: The research identifies three distinct pathways to resilience development: stabilization, focussing on bouncing back to the original normal;adaptation, involving evolutionary changes to a new normal;transformation, involving revolutionary changes in pursuit of a new normal-plus. Three strategic orientations are identified as operating across these pathways: people orientation, digital orientation, and learning orientation. Originality/value: In contrast to the manufacturing supply chain focus of most current research, this research concentrates on the service supply chain, investigating its resilience with a social-ecological perspective alongside the traditional engineering one. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Epidemiological Analysis of COVID-19 Outbreaks in Wuhu, China, from January to March 2020

Background: COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, has spread worldwide and become a global pandemic. Objective(s): Studies of the earliest events of the COVID-19 pandemic are critical in understanding how the pandemic started and providing insight into the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and its infection in humans. Method(s): In this report, we studied the epidemiological characteristics of all 34 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Wuhu, China, from January 3 to March 19, 2020. Result(s): Our study indicated that cases in male patients (61.76%, 21/34) outnumbered those in female patients (38.24%, 13/34). Studies of the age distribution among the confirmed cases revealed that most COVID-19 patients were 15 to 59 years of age (26/34, 76%), while more than 14% (5/34) were >= 60 years old, and less than 9% (3/34) were <= 14 years old. Notably, 32 of the 34 confirmed cases were (a) people who had recently resided in or traveled to Wuhan or had close contact with Wuhan residents or visitors (22 cases);and (b) people who had close contact with these 22 confirmed COVID-19 patients (10 cases). Conclusion(s): This study revealed the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 outbreaks in Wuhu between January and March 2020 and provided insight into the earliest events of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Our analyses suggested that the COVID-19 cases confirmed in Wuhu in 2020 were directly related to or originated from the outbreaks in Wuhan. Copyright © 2022, Author(s).

Research on Prevention and Control Strategies for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games under the Impact of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought severe challenges and great uncertainties to the preparations and normal staging of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Based on this background, this paper analyzes the global COVID-19 for the future development of three kinds of epidemic situation, different situation the different influence to the Beijing Olympics, and finally from the games competitions held offline and use the Internet online hold the perspective of two run competitions modes, respectively, under the influence of the global COVID-19 outbreak proposed the concrete prevention and control countermeasures of the Beijing Olympics. In order to provide theoretical reference and decision-making support for the normal holding and operation of Beijing Winter Olympic Games. © 2021 IEEE.

Research on the risk of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games and the countermeasures of the preparatory work transition under the influence of COVID-19

As the most influential sports event in the world, there will be many athletes and spectators from all over the world during the Olympic Games. However, the continuing severe global COVID-19 situation has a significant impact on the smooth hosting of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics Games (hereinafter referred to as the 'Beijing Winter Olympics'). Based on above, this paper analyzed the impact of the global COVID-19 and expounded the six risks of Beijing Winter Olympic Games. Finally, it provided corresponding suggestions and countermeasures of the preparatory work transition for the change of running mode. It is expected to provide theoretical reference and decision-making support for the Beijing Winter Olympic Games to prevent and control of the COVID-19 emergency risk. © 2021 IEEE.

Evolutionary selection for travel agencies under COVID-19 adversity through the lens of life history theory

This study draws on life history theory to rationalize how tourism enterprises make decisions and evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a case study approach, the current work improvises the house of trade-off paradox as a visual metaphoric framework that integrates three major dyadic trade-off pairs along with four organizational resource configuration aspects. This inquiry further synthesizes the wheel of selection strategy to pinpoint a mechanism in which tourism agencies mutate to adapt to a new normal based on acute environmental shocks. We further provide practical implications for operators with valuable insights germane to post-pandemic recovery.

SensiBlend: Sensing Blended Experiences in Professional and Social Contexts

Unlike traditional workshops, SensiBlend is a living experiment about the future of remote, hybrid, and blended experiences within professional and other social contexts. The interplay of interpersonal relationships with tools and spaces-digital and physical-has been abruptly challenged and fundamentally altered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this meta-workshop, we seek to scrutinize and advance the role and impact of Ubiquitous Computing in the new "blended"social reality, and raise questions relating to the specific attributes of socio-Technical experiences in the future organization of interpersonal relationships. How do we better equip people to deal with blended experiences? What dimensions of socio-Technical experiences are at stake? To this end, we will utilize the occasion of a virtual UbiComp in combination with novel remote-working tools and participatory sensing with attendees to collectively examine, discuss, and elicit the potential routes of augmenting social practices in a discourse about the future of blended working, socializing, and living. © 2021 ACM.

vContact: Private WiFi-based IoT Contact Tracing with Virus Lifespan

Covid-19 is primarily spread through contact with the virus which may survive on surfaces with a lifespan of hours or even days if not sanitized. To curb its spread, it is hence of vital importance to detect those who have been in contact with the virus for a sustained period of time, the so-called close contacts. Most of the existing digital approaches for contact tracing focus only on direct face-to-face contacts. There has been little work on detecting indirect environmental contact, which is to detect people coming into a contaminated area with the live virus, i.e., an area last visited by an infected person within the virus lifespan. In this work, we study automatic IoT contact tracing when the virus has a lifespan which may depend on the disinfection frequency at a location. Leveraging the ubiquity of WiFi signals, we propose vContact, a novel, private, pervasive and fully distributed WiFi-based IoT contact tracing approach. Users carrying an IoT device (phone, wearable, dongle, etc.) continuously scan WiFi access points (APs) and store their hashed IDs. Given a confirmed case, the signals are then uploaded to a server for other users to match in their local IoT devices for virus exposure notification. vContact is not based on device pairing, and no information of other users is stored locally. The confirmed case does not need to have the device for it to work properly. As WiFi data are sampled sporadically and asynchronously, vContact uses novel and effective signal processing approaches and a similarity metric to align and match signals at any time. We conduct extensive indoor and outdoor experiments to validate vContact performance. Our results demonstrate that vContact is effective and accurate for contact detection. The precision, recall and F1-score of contact detection are high (up to 90%) for close contact proximity (2m). Its performance is robust against AP numbers, AP changes and phone heterogeneity. Having implemented vContact as an Android SDK and installed it on phones and smart watches, we present a case study to demonstrate the validity and implementability of our design in notifying its users about their exposure to the virus with a specific lifespan. IEEE

Clinical characteristics and outcomes of the patients with COVID-19: A report of 62 cases

Objective To investigate the early clinical characteristics and diagnosis of and therapeutic approaches for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Methods The clinical manifestations and treatment of 62 patients with COVID-19 admitted to Hainan Province People's Hospital during the period from January 21 to February 10, 2019 were analyzed retrospectively. The COVID-19 patients were classified into 3 groups: general, severe and critical types according to the disease severity and the white blood cell, neutrophil and lymphocyte counts were compared between the 3 groups. The 62 patients were given symptomatic and supportive, antiviral, hormonal and Chinese herbal treatment. Results 79.03% (49/62) of patients had a history of traveling or living in Wuhan. The incubation period was (6.85±4.45) d. The clinical features including fever (80.65%), dry cough (62.9%), fatigue (25.81%), shortness of breath (19.35%), and dyspnea (14.52%), sore throat (9.68%), nasal congestion and runny nose (9.68%), muscle soreness (8.06%), diarrhea, vomiting (3.23%), and nausea (4.84%). 95.16% (59/62) of patients had normal or relatively low white blood cell counts. There were statistically significant differences in the counts of leukocytes, neutrophils, and lymphocytes between the 3 groups of the patients (P<0.05). 77.78% (7/9) of the critically ill patients with lymphocyte counts below 0.8×109/L. 90.32% (56/62) of patients typically presented with single or multiple lung lobes/ segments showing ground glass shadow. The average time for CT and CR showing progress and starting to improve and absorb was (9.05±3.75) d and (14.94±7.32) d, respectively. The total course of disease among the 57 discharged patients was 9-38 d, with an average of (21.05±7.17) d. The length of hospital stay was 8-34 d, with an average hospital stay of (15.32±6.49) d. After treatment, the time of the negative mutation of the novel coronavirus was (11.56±6.56) d. Obvious dyspnea occurred in 9 critically ill patients, among them 7 patients needed invasive ventilator support and 2 non-invasive ventilator support. Conclusions In the early clinical stage of COVID-19, fever is the main manifestation. Individual patients are asymptomatic. CT is characterized by ground glass-like changes. Critical patients have significant dyspnea, which can be accompanied by kidney damage. If lung imaging suggests a rapid progress of inflammatory exudation, CRRT (continuous renal replacement therapy) and respiratory support therapy can be given on an individual basis.