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Vaccines have made great contributions to the prevention of infectious diseases, but vaccine hesitancy is widespread in the world. The reasons for vaccine hesitancy are complex, but the main reasons are the lack of public awareness of vaccine-preventable diseases and the lack of confidence in vaccine effectiveness and safety. In the context of the continuous spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, boosting public confidence and ensuring the orderly development of the vaccination work of COVID-19 vaccines and conventional vaccines are necessary to curb the resurgence of the COVID-19 epidemic and prevent the outbreak of various infectious diseases in China. Under the current situation, the main measures to deal with vaccine hesitancy are to play the role of health care institutions, improve public health literacy, normalize the public opinion orientation of the media platform, strengthen the supervision of vaccine clinical research and production, and do a good job in surveillance and compensation for adverse events following immunization.Copyright © 2021 by the Chinese Medical Association.
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The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic triggers infodemic over online social media, which significantly impacts public health around the world, both physically and psychologically. In this paper, we study the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of influential social media users, whose sharing behaviours significantly promote the diffusion of COVID-19 related information. Specifically, we focus on subjective well-being (SWB), and analyse whether SWB changes have a relationship with their bridging performance in information diffusion, which measures the speed and wideness gain of information transmission due to their sharing. We accurately capture users' bridging performance by proposing a new measurement. Benefiting from deep-learning natural language processing models, we quantify social media users' SWB from their textual posts. With the data collected from Twitter for almost two years, we reveal the greater mental suffering of influential users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through comprehensive hierarchical multiple regression analysis, we are the first to discover the strong relationship between social users' SWB and their bridging performance. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Background. The spread of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacterales (CPE) is global threat. Numerous outbreaks of CPE have been reported during the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe the impact of of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on the emergence of CPE in south-central Ontario, Canada. Incidence of clinical isolates of CPE and isolates with different CPE genes in Toronto/Peel region, 2017-2021. The upper panel shows the incidence of patients with clinical isolates of CPE by year and quarter from q4 2007 to q1 2022. The lower panel shows the incidence of patients with clinical isolates with different carbapenemase genes by fiscal year during the same period. Methods. TIBDN has performed population-based surveillance for CPE in Toronto/Peel region (pop 4.5M) from first identified isolate in 2007. All laboratories test/refer all carbapenem non-susceptible Enterobacterial isolates for identification of CPE. Hospital charts are reviewed and patients/physicians interviewed. Population data are obtained from Statistics Canada. Results. From 10/2007 to 3/31/2022, 1367 persons colonized or infected with CPE were identified. Theirmedian age was 68.7yrs (IQR 54-78yrs);761 (56%) weremale. 772 (56%) were colonized when first identified;115 (8.4%) were bacteremic at identification or subsequently developed bacteremia. The most common organisms were E. coli (651, 48%), K. pneumoniae (436, 32%), Enterobacter spp. (146, 11%), Citrobacter spp (62, 5%);the most common genes were NDM+/-OXA-48 (722, 53%), OXA-48-like (341, 25%), KPC (225, 16%), VIM(44, 3%). The incidence of CPE infections increased steadily until 3/2020 then declined by 61%and remained stable until 3/2022 (Figure, upper panel). The declinewas greater for E. coli (56%decrease), K. pneumoniae (62%) than for Enterobacter spp. (30%) and other species (19%). It occurred in all genes in 2020;however, KPC containing organisms increased again in 2021 (Figure, lower panel). Conclusion. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with an immediate, substantial decline in the incidence of patients with CPE in our population area. This decline occurred in both isolates with genes usually occurring in cases imported from other countries, and in those usually occurring in cases associated with transmission within Canadian hospitals. Decreased travel and enhanced infection prevention and control in hospitals may both have contributed to reductions in CPE during the pandemic. (Figure Presented).
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Microbial contamination and infection are global issues in the food and environmental fields that seriously threaten human health. Bacteria and fungi can easily cause food spoilage, resulting in diarrhea and vomiting;viruses can infect humans through different transmission routes, causing severe or even fatal harm. Hence, rapid analysis and identification of pathogenic microorganisms and simultaneous detection of multiple types of microbes have become hot research topics in biochemical analysis and molecular diagnosis. The lateral flow assay (LFA) is a simple, rapid, economical, and efficient detection technology with high sensitivity, simple operation, and environmental friendliness. It can provide instant test results under non-laboratory circumstances, hence becoming an ideal choice for point-of-care testing, which has been applied to rapidly detect various targets. The current conventional principle of the LFA is still based on the specific recognition of the antigen by the antibody. However, as a commonly used target recognition molecule in conventional biochemical and medical detection, the application of antibodies also has certain limitations for rapid and accurate identification of certain targets due to strict control of the production and purification process, as well as susceptibility to the interference of the operating environment, pH, temperature, and other conditions, such as long production cycle, high cost, poor stability, and cross-reactivity. Aptamers are a class of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) or RNA obtained through the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX), which can usually form a stable secondary structure. Aptamers can be folded into a three-dimensional structure through conformational change and interact with the target through conformation complementarity, π-π stacking between aromatic rings, base stacking, electrostatic interaction, and hydrogen bonding. So far, nearly 300 kinds of aptamers have been discovered. As alternatives, aptamers are easy and facile to modify and label with high sensitivity and specificity. Accordingly, the innovative rapid detection technique can be developed by combining the LFA with an aptamer. This aptamer-based LFA technology can be widely used in qualitative, semi-quantitative, and quantitative detection in food safety, environment, clinical, and other fields. Nowadays, most microbe detection methods are constructed based on this approach. The common strategies of aptamer-based LFAs include the sandwich method, competitive method, and adsorption–desorption method. Diverse ingenious materials such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots have also been proposed for signal read-out. Different signal capture models, such as colorimetric and fluorescence methods, have been applied for sensitive and accurate detection of a single or multiple target microbe. Furthermore, in view of the unique properties of nucleic acid aptamers, several signal amplification methods can be further involved in the LFA to enhance the sensitivity for target detection. This review introduces the use of aptamers with different structural patterns and labeling types in recent years, as well as a variety of methods to detect microbes, especially for the rapid detection of pathogenic bacteria. Based on the excellent characteristics, the aptamer-based LFA presents more flexibility and selectivity for microbe detection with good applicability, specificity, and sensitivity and can better achieve low-cost, rapid detection. This study is expected to provide a reference for developing nucleic acid aptamer-based LFA technologies, especially for efficient and accurate diagnosis of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19), exploiting the novel application scope of LFA technology. © 2022 Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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In this work, a stochastic differential equation model about the novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is introduced to describe the transmission dynamics of that disease among the susceptible person. By taking the social distance, musk wearing, and other human behavior as a control strategy and introducing an objective function which both considers the limitation of social distance and minimizes the infection population, an optimal control strategy is given numerically. This result gives a new numerical method to simulate the epidemic model and make a new insight into the control strategy choice of the pandemic control under the environments and conditions of different countries. © 2021 IEEE.
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An information outbreak occurs on social media along with the COVID-19 pandemic and leads to infodemic. Predicting the popularity of online content, known as cascade prediction, allows for not only catching in advance hot information that deserves attention, but also identifying false information that will widely spread and require quick response to mitigate its impact. Among the various information diffusion patterns leveraged in previous works, the spillover effect of the information exposed to users on their decision to participate in diffusing certain information is still not studied. In this paper, we focus on the diffusion of information related to COVID-19 preventive measures. Through our collected Twitter dataset, we validated the existence of this spillover effect. Building on the finding, we proposed extensions to three cascade prediction methods based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Experiments conducted on our dataset demonstrated that the use of the identified spillover effect significantly improves the state-of-the-art GNNs methods in predicting the popularity of not only preventive measure messages, but also other COVID-19 related messages. © 2021 Owner/Author.
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Vaccines have made great contributions to the prevention of infectious diseases, but vaccine hesitancy is widespread in the world. The reasons for vaccine hesitancy are complex, but the main reasons are the lack of public awareness of vaccine-preventable diseases and the lack of confidence in vaccine effectiveness and safety. In the context of the continuous spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, boosting public confidence and ensuring the orderly development of the vaccination work of COVID-19 vaccines and conventional vaccines are necessary to curb the resurgence of the COVID-19 epidemic and prevent the outbreak of various infectious diseases in China. Under the current situation, the main measures to deal with vaccine hesitancy are to play the role of health care institutions, improve public health literacy, normalize the public opinion orientation of the media platform, strengthen the supervision of vaccine clinical research and production, and do a good job in surveillance and compensation for adverse events following immunization. Copyright © 2021 by the Chinese Medical Association.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic reshapes our social landscape, its lessons have far-reaching implications on how online service providers manage their infrastructure to mitigate risks. This paper presents Facebook's risk-driven backbone management strategy to ensure high service performance throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe Risk Simulation System (RSS), a production system that identifies possible failures and quantifies their potential severity with a set of metrics for network risk. With a year-long risk measurement from RSS we show that our backbone resiliently withstood the COVID-19 stress test, achieving high service availability and low route dilation while efficiently handling traffic surges. We also share our operational practices to mitigate risk throughout the pandemic. Our findings give insights to further improve risk-driven network management. We argue for incorporating short-term failure statistics in modeling failures. Common failure prediction models based on long-term modeling achieve stable output at the cost of assigning low significance to unique short-term events of extreme importance such as COVID-19. Furthermore, we advocate augmenting network management techniques with non-networking signals. We support this by identifying and analyzing the correlation between network traffic and human mobility.
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COVID-2019 outbroke in China at the beginning of 2020. Traditional face-to-face teaching cannot he achieved during the epidemic, and all schools across the country turned to online teaching. However, online education still faces many difficulties, and the most important question is how to ensure teaching quality. In this paper, we discussed some pedagogical approaches, including online teaching with the enhanced design of interactions, learning theories and problem-based learning, which are useful for designing courses. Then, a computer foundation course was taken as an example to show how to transit a traditional face-to-face course into an online course utilizing the pedagogical approaches and conduct teaching adjustment based on students' learning behavior.
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Objective: To summarize and discuss the experience of perioperative hemodynamic management of lung transplant recipients. Methods: A total of 19 lung transplant recipients from December 2016 to December 2020 were investigated in Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, all of which were transferred to the intensive care unit for further monitoring and treatment, and their clinical data were retrospectively analyzed. Results: The 19 lung transplant recipients included 5 cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), 5 cases of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), 4 cases of pneumoconiosis, 2 cases of bronchiectasis, 1 case of later lung fibrosis associated with COVID-19, 1 case of connective tissue disease-related pulmonary fibrosis, and 1 case of Kartagener syndrome. Twelve cases adopted double lung transplantation, while seven cases reveived unilateral lung transplantation (4 cases of left single lung transplantation and 3 cases of right single lung transplantation). There were 6 deaths during the perioperative period. One case died of multi-drug resistant bacteria infection, one case died of circulatory failure caused by active thoracic hemorrhage post-operation, the third case died of intraoperative cardiac arrest, and the other 3 cases were given up because of multiple organs failure. The remaining 13 cases were cured and discharged. Of the 19 recipients, 14 received vasopressors. The total and daily fluid output of the recipients in 3 postoperation days were greater than the input volume (P<0.05). Conclusion: Lung transplantation is an effective method for the treatment of end-stage lung disease. The hemodynamic management is a keypoint during perioperative period. It is import to maintain the blood volume as low as possible under the premise of systemic perfusion, limit the amount of fluid, choose albumin or plasma to increase the colloidal osmotic pressure, and strengthen the maintenance of right heart function. These abobe measures may improve the prognosis of lung transplant recipients. © 2021, Editorial Board of Medical Journal of Wuhan University. All right reserved.
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This study aimed to describe the clinical characteristics and prognosis of COVID-19 patients who received tracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation. A total of 52 critical COVID-19 patients who received tracheal intubation were retrospectively included. The primary data including clinical features, laboratory results, and the outcomes were collected and analyzed. Among the 52 patients who received tracheal intubation, 14 were successfully extubated within two weeks and 38 failed extubation. The patients in the extubation failure group were significantly older than the patients in the successful extubation group (median age, 67.50 years vs 55.50 years). The median values of SpO2 and the PaO2/FiO2 (P/F) before tracheal intubation were significantly lower in extubation failure group than the those in successful extubation group (SpO2: 78.50% vs 85%, P/F: 71.50 mmHg vs 84.50 mmHg). Compared with the successful extubation group, the extubation failure group was found to have a significantly lower 28-day survival rate (21.05% vs 100%). Patients with extubation failure had more severe multi-organ injuries. Besides, a more severe hypoxia level was found to be associated with the failure of extubation and subsequent poor prognosis. Therefore, tracheal intubation and timely invasive mechanical ventilation should be administered in COVID-19 patients with refractory hypoxemia.
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OBJECTIVE: Many studies have been published recently on the characteristics of the clinical manifestations of COVID-19 in children. The quality scores of literature are different, and the incidence of clinical manifestations and laboratory tests results vary greatly. Therefore, a systematic retrospective meta-analysis is needed to determine the incidence of the clinical manifestations of COVID-19 in children. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data from databases, such as PubMed, Web of science, EMBASE, Johns Hopkins University, and Chinese databases were analysed from January 31, 2020 to October 20, 2020. High-quality articles were selected for analysis based on a quality standard score. A meta-analysis of random effects was used to determine the prevalence of comorbidities and subgroup meta-analysis to examine the changes in the estimated prevalence in different subgroups. RESULTS: Seventy-one articles involving 11,671 children were included in the study. The incidence of fever, respiratory symptoms, gastrointestinal symptoms, asymptomatic patients, nervous system symptoms, and chest tightness was 55.8%, 56.8%, 14.4%, 21.1%, 6.7%, and 6.1%, respectively. The incidence of multisystem inflammatory syndrome was 6.2%. Laboratory examination results showed that lymphocytes decreased in 12% and leukocytes decreased in 8.8% of patients, whereas white blood cells increased in 7.8% of patients. Imaging showed abnormalities in 66.5%, and ground-glass opacities were observed in 36.9% patients. Epidemiological history was present in 85.2% cases; severe disease rate was 3.33%. The mortality rate was 0.28%. CONCLUSIONS: The clinical symptoms of COVID-19 in children are mild, and laboratory indicators and imaging manifestations are atypical. While screening children for COVID-19, in addition to assessing patients for symptoms as the first step of screening, the epidemiological history of patients should be obtained.
Subject(s)
COVID-19/blood , COVID-19/diagnostic imaging , COVID-19/complications , COVID-19/etiology , Child , Child, Preschool , Humans , Retrospective Studies , Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome/blood , Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome/diagnostic imaging , Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome/etiologyABSTRACT
Understanding the transmission mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 is a prerequisite to effective control measures. To investigate the potential modes of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, 21 COVID-19 patients from 12-47 days after symptom onset were recruited. We monitored the release of SARS-CoV-2 from the patients' exhaled breath and systematically investigated environmental contamination of air, public surfaces, personal necessities, and the drainage system. SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in 0 of 9 exhaled breath samples, 2 of 8 exhaled breath condensate samples, 1 of 12 bedside air samples, 4 of 132 samples from private surfaces, 0 of 70 samples from frequently touched public surfaces in isolation rooms, and 7 of 23 feces-related air/surface/water samples. The maximum viral RNA concentrations were 1857 copies/m3 in the air, 38 copies/cm2 in sampled surfaces and 3092 copies/mL in sewage/wastewater samples. Our results suggest that nosocomial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can occur via multiple routes. However, the low detection frequency and limited quantity of viral RNA from the breath and environmental specimens may be related to the reduced viral load of the COVID-19 patients on later days after symptom onset. These findings suggest that the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 differ from those of SARS-CoV in healthcare settings.