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The Coronaviridae family's severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-Co V-2) outbreak has infected a large number of the population during the COVID- 19 pandemic. The most prominent mode of virus transmission is considered through respiratory droplets of the infected person. Virus-mediated respiratory infection depends upon the binding between spike protein and the Angiotensinconverting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor expressed in lung alveolar type 2 cells. But some studies reported that gastrointestinal infection is also one of the prominent symptoms of COVID-19 because of the high expression of the ACE2 receptor in absorptive enterocytes of the small intestine. In a country like India, with high population density and due to unhygienic sanitation, it is crucial to understand the potential fecal-oral transmission route of SARS-CoV-2 during infection because of presence of ACE2 in small intestine. Therefore in our study, we aim to trace the potential fecal-oral transmission route of SARS-Co V-2 by examining human stool (collected from hospital settings) and nearby sewage water systems, followed by molecular characterization and viral load kinetics evaluation of SARSCOV- 2. qRT-PCR and NGS sequencing methods were used. The presence of SARS-COV-2 was reported in around 70% of samples (both clinical and environmental), this will help us to establish the epidemiological link between clinical and environmental samples after genomic analysis to alter the circulation of silent SARS Co V2 in the community.
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Work-life balance helps to maintain an attractive organizational culture and remove work-life conflicts and show the path to employees of how to be more efficient in different work roles. This balanced practice is giving a care and feeling of protection to the employees. It motivates better performance that contributes to employee engagement indices. The main purpose of this study is to report work-life balance pre- and during the COVID-19 pandemic by bibliometric analysis. This study analyzed 4,030 "work-life balance” studies published between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019, from the pre-pandemic era, and 1,143 studies published during the pandemic (between January 1, 2020-March 24, 2021). The data were extracted from the Scopus database using keywords "work-life balance” and keywords in titles (items) analyzed using VOSviewer software. Co-occurrence connection between keywords in titles and density visualization based on the total link strength clearly shows that COVID-19 significantly impacted work-life balance and related research. © 2023 IGI Global. All rights reserved.
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World is facing a new pandemic called covid-19SARS-CoV-2) since a year ago. Unfortunately there is no treatment for Covid 19 nowadays as well as no potential therapies has been developed to overcome from coronavirus pandemic. Some potential drug molecules with combination have ability to respond for covid19 virus. From the research it was found that the reduction of viral load can be treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combination. We evaluate the mode of interactions of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin with the dynamic site of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus main protease. Molecular Structure-based computational approach viz. molecular docking simulations were performed to scale up their affinity and binding fitness of the docked complex of novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus protease and hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The natural inhibitor N3 of novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus protease were exhibited highest affinity in terms of MolDock score (-167.203Kcal/mol), and hydroxychloroquine was found with lowest target affinity (-55.917 Kcal/mol).The amino acid residue cysteine 145 and histidine 41 is bound covalently and formed hydrogen bond interaction with SARS-CoV-2 inhibitor known as inhibitor N3 as such, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin also formed hydrogen bond interaction. The binding patterns of the inhibitor N3 of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus main protease could be used as a guideline for medicinal chemist to explore their SARS-CoV-2 inhibitory potential. Copyright © RJPT All right reserved.
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The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has generated anxieties in many sectors thereby shrinking the economy globally. The rigorous lockdown regulations in India affect all the aspects of the country’s economy at a galloping speed. The present study investigates how the pandemic changes the banking habits among people from physical mode to digital mode. The study takes into account 400 customers from West Bengal, India of different commercial banks. The study investigates the results with the application of Wilcoxon sign test, effect size test, Kruskal-Wallis test, etc. The study finds that there is a significant change of banking habits from physical mode to digital mode during the pandemic time. Though the pandemic has not significantly changed the banking habits of rural and female customers and further acceptance of digital banking significantly differs among several customers’ age groups. Copyright © 2022 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome-Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is one of the worst human health problems faced by humanity in recent centuries. An end to this health crisis relies on our ability to monitor viral transmission dynamics to check spread, develop therapeutics and preventatives for treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection and understand the pathophysiology of the disease for better management of the patients. Omics technologies have played a crucial part in understanding the different aspects of COVID-19 disease. While whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 isolates from across the globe has aided in the development of molecular diagnostic assays and informed about the viral evolution, knowledge of structure and function of viral proteome fueled the development of small molecule and biologicals therapeutics as well as vaccines. Concurrently, metabolomic profiling of samples from COVID-19 patients experiencing a varying level of disease severity has provided a snapshot of the pathophysiology of the disease helping device effective treatment regimen. This chapter deals with genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic profiling of SRAS-CoV-2. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Serological assays can reveal immune status against COVID-19 informing individual and public healthcare decisions. We report a multiplexed and label-free nanoplasmonic biosensor that can discriminate healthy from convalescent samples with high sensitivity (95%) and specificity (100%) based on anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody quantification. Our results show high concordance (R~ 0.87) with commercial assays in detecting anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. © 2022 The Author(s)
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The entire globe is undergoing a condition of chaotic situation and has started accepting it to be the “new normal.” Scientists from all around the world are putting their best efforts to find out the vaccine for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), but people's faith in the supernatural is also strong. Popular folk beliefs and treatment of the pandemic is age-old, for example, Sitala Mata is known for the treatment of smallpox and Olabibi for cholera. Folk deities in the rural areas create a protective cover and these beliefs get more strengthened by Babas, Guniyas. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the relationship between religious discourses and the pandemic and to study about the two different opposite approaches, i.e., religion and science. The study is based on the review of secondary data. The chapter mainly focuses on the current trend being followed during COVID-19 by analyzing it from a sociological angle. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Background: There are various effects of novel corona virus on cardiac system. As the name itself suggests (novel corona virus) new strain, the available data is restricted. Hence, it makes difficult to relate cardiac injury in covid positive patient. It is yet unclear whether treatment on cardiac injury should be given to covid positive patient? If yes what precautions should be taken? Aim and objective: To discuss the effects of corona virus on heart and cardiac system, as well as kinds of cardiac injury cause by I and treatment for the same. Description: Corona virus ailment is a pulmonary ailment triggered by a new variant of corona virus. In which 'CO' positions for corona, 'VI' for virus, and 'D' for ailment. 'While corona virus ailment is dispersing speedily, maximum individuals will experience only negligible or reasonable signs. Coronavirus can cause serious ailment in some individuals. Symptoms of this disease are: Major symptoms Temperature. Dry coughing. Fatigue. Minor symptoms Headaches and pains. Sore throat. Pinkeye. Headache. Dysgeusia and odour blindness. The existing Corona virus ailment epidemic has given rise to over one million diseased worldwide and thousands of expiry. The virus binds and comes in the cell through angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). Corona virus ailment cans consequences in complete inflammation, multiorgan dysfunction, and serious ailment. Now a days, a very strange thing has been noticed that, "Cardio vascular ailments are found to be the communal phenomenon in affected individual with Corona virus ailment." And therefore we can conclude that recently used therapies given to corona virus ailment positive affected individuals may interact with cardiovascular treatment. Hence, Covid-19 may have straight or unintended consequence on CVS. Conclusion: Emergency clinicians should be attentive of these cardiovascular difficulties when estimating and handling the affected individuals with Corona virus ailment.
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COVID-19 virus has been a worldwide pandemic since its outbreak from December 2019. While coronavirus has a low fatality rate, it is extremely infectious and escalates quickly;therefore, early detection is very important for preventing its outbreak. The procedures currently used by medical personals for detection is RT-PCR test. However, it includes false negative reports and also is a time taking process;thus an alternate solution is required. Any diagnostic system that can detect COVID-19 infection can be very helpful to medical personals. The features found in COVID-19 images by X-rays are very similar to other lung diseases, which makes it very difficult to differentiate. This review includes the contribution of image processing and machine learning to make swift and precise diagnostic system from lung X-ray images. Such a system can be used by radiologists for making decisions and can be very helpful in prior detection of the virus. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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The COVID-19 has slowly spread all over the world. Hence, to get rid of this deadly virus, vaccination is very important, but for a country like India, vaccinating the whole country is not possible within a very short time. So vaccine prioritization should be done in a very effective way. For an instance, the elderly persons or people having health issues or frontline workers are to be given higher priority for vaccination than other masses. Age and job designation are not the only attributes that affect a person’s chance of getting infected. Covacdisor has been specifically developed for this purpose using machine learning (ML), where the infection risk factor is predicted. The prediction would help in the proper prioritization of vaccines. The predicted risk factor is dependent on 24 parameters. These parameters directly affect a person’s immunity. A dataset has been proposed with these 24 parameters. Support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), logistics regression (LR), and random forest (RF) have been used for training the model on the proposed dataset and got the highest accuracy of 0.85 from RF. Random forest is applied on the backend of the Web Application which is acting as a user interface and predicts the risk group of the user. With this proposed technique, prediction of the urgency of a user to get vaccinated can be done, which would help in achieving herd immunity faster by prioritizing the vaccination of the vulnerable population. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectioncaused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2). Since there is activation of both inflammatory and thrombotic pathways in this disease, indices derived from routinelymeasured blood parameters, whose role is established in severe sepsis,are being evaluated worldwide as potential prognostic markers.Aims &Objectives: In this study we aimed to evaluate the role ofAbsolute Neutrophil count (ANC), Absolute Lymphocyte Count(ALC), Mean platelet volume (MPV), platelet distribution width(PDW), Plateletcrit (PCT), Platelet-large cell ratio(P-LCR), Neutrophil Platelet ratio (NPR) and Platelet Lymphocyte ratio (PLR) inpredicting survival amongst patients admitted with COVID-19infection.Materials &Methods: We conducted a retrospective chart review ofall moderate to severely ill adult patients admitted with COVID-19pneumonia admitted at All India Institute of Medical Sciences,Bhopal, a tertiary care hospital in Central India from April 2020-November 2020. Information about their demography, clinical features, laboratory investigations and in-hospital survival were collectedfrom charts.Result: The study included 1331 patients, out of these 1181 weresurvivors (389 females;792 males) and 150 were non survivors (35females;115 males). Amongst the various parameters studied ANC,NPR and PCT were found to be significantly lower amongst thesurvivors as compared to the non survivors whereas ALC was significantly higher amongst the survivors.Conclusions: The results of the current study showed that ANC,ALC, NPR and PCT can be used as useful cost-effective prognosticmarkers in patients with COVID-19 infection.
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To meet the unprecedented requirement of diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2, a large number of diagnostic kits were authorized by concerned authorities for diagnostic use within a short period of time during the initial phases of the ongoing pandemic. We undertook this study to evaluate the inter-test agreement and other key operational features of 5 such commercial kits that have been extensively used in India for routine diagnostic testing for COVID-19. The five commercial kits were evaluated, using a panel of positive and negative respiratory samples, considering the kit provided by National Institute of Virology, Indian Council of Medical Research (2019-nCoV Kit) as the reference. The positive panel comprised of individuals who fulfilled the 3 criteria of being clinically symptomatic, having history of contact with diagnosed cases and testing positive in the reference kit. The negative panel included both healthy and disease controls, the latter being drawn from individuals diagnosed with other respiratory viral infections. The same protocol of sample collection, same RNA extraction kit and same RT-PCR instrument were used for all the kits. Clinical samples were collected from a panel of 92 cases and 60 control patients, who fulfilled our inclusion criteria. The control group included equal number of healthy individuals and patients infected with other respiratory viruses (n = 30, in each group). We observed varying sensitivity and specificity among the evaluated kits, with LabGun COVID-19 RT-PCR kit showing the highest sensitivity and specificity (94% and 100% respectively), followed by TaqPath COVID-19 Combo and Allplex 2019-nCoV assays. The extent of inter-test agreement was not associated with viral loads of the samples. Poor correlation was observed between Ct values of the same genes amplified using different kits. Our findings reveal the presence of wide heterogeneity and sub-optimal inter-test agreement in the diagnostic performance of the evaluated kits and hint at the need of adopting stringent standards for fulfilling the quality assurance requirements of the COVID-19 diagnostic process.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 Testing , COVID-19 , Humans , Pandemics , Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction , Sensitivity and SpecificityABSTRACT
Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a key non-invasive technique to extract vital signs like heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and blood oxygen saturation (SpO2). Integrated in smartwatches, health patches and finger clips, PPG sensors are widely used in fitness, glucose, blood pressure, and medical monitoring with good user comfort. Integrating PPG in medical chest patches is interesting for COVID-19 patients since it can yield, next to HR and respiration, also SpO2, which traditional ECG-based patches cannot provide. However, measuring PPG/SpO 2 on the chest is challenging due to large motion artifacts, small AC/DC perfusion index (PI \lt 0.1%), and ambient light. Therefore, it poses a more stringent requirement on dynamic range (DR \gt 120 dB) for the PPG readout circuit, while still requiring low power consumption for long battery life. On-chip pinned-photodiodes (PPDs) have been used as passive integrators, resulting in very low power consumption (2.63 \mu \mathrm{W}) for the PPG readout [1]. However, the DR and linearity can be limited by the PPDs' parasitic capacitors. Direct light-todigital converter (LDC) topologies are proposed in [2 - 4], but their DR is still below 120dB. In [5], a digital-controlled TIA is exploited to control the transimpedance gain, which extends the DR to 130dB while consuming 72 \mu \mathrm{W} in the analog front-end (AFE). © 2021 IEEE.
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Evaluation of acquired demyelinating syndrome (ADS) without diagnostic biomarkers results in diagnostic and therapeutic challenges in pediatric population. Immune-mediated ADS of childhood responds well to steroid and intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) and in refractory cases with plasma exchange. Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) coinfection in such cases imposes technical challenges in management. An 11-year-old girl with quadriparesis and loss of vision and a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain showing acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis (ADEM) and cerebrospinal fluid examination being noncontributory responded well with plasma exchange after failing steroid and IVIg is described. Coinfection with COVID-19 mandating personal protection in a temperate country imposed technical challenges in her management.
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The magnitude and pace of global affliction caused by Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) is unprecedented in the recent past. From starting in a busy seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the virus has spread across the globe in less than a year, infecting over 76 million people and causing death of close to 1.7 million individuals worldwide. As no specific anti-viral treatment is currently available, the major strategy in containing the pandemic is focused on early diagnosis and prompt isolation of the infected individuals. Several diagnostic modalities have emerged within a relatively short period, which can be broadly classified into molecular and immunological assays. While the former category is centered around real-time PCR, which is currently considered the gold standard of diagnosis, the latter aims to detect viral antigens or antibodies specific to the viral antigens and is yet to be recommended as a stand-alone diagnostic tool. This review aims to provide an update on the different diagnostic modalities that are currently being used in diagnostic laboratories across the world as well as the up-coming methods and challenges associated with each of them. In a rapidly evolving diagnostic landscape with several testing platforms going through various phases of development and/or regulatory clearance, it is prudent that the clinical community familiarizes itself with the nuances of different testing modalities currently being employed for this condition.
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The construction industry is one of the most important industries for national development in the world. It is an unorganized sector and most of the time human-driven;a large number of people are working in this sector. In the pandemic of COVID-19 most of the construction sites are being halted due to fear about the infection of Coronavirus. The projects are already delayed in relation to completion and handover. The developers are not facing the cost escalation risk only, also afraid of the spreading of COVID-19 in projects. The model of Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws says that it is the duty of the employers to take care of the health and safety of their workers in the workplace. In the building and construction industry where workers work closely together, there is a high risk of exposure to COVID-19. During this epidemic situation, all the employers and constructors should implement the control measures to minimize the spread of COVID-19 and provide a safe work environment to the workers. In this study, we are highlighting the impact of novel Coronavirus in the construction industry associated with risk assessment and how to implement the safety measures for the workers during and post pandemic. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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Neo-liberalism's claim of being the vanguard of individual freedom works as the basis of popular support for education system reforms, which aim at making society receptive to the principles of free market. In the process, contents and methods of teaching-learning are redesigned to build public consent for those reforms, while the real objectives are to possibly ensure a steady flow of skilled human resource for the market. The COVID-19 pandemic and resultant changes in the education system are being used to increase acceptability of the reforms. © 2020 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.