A critical review of public–private partnerships in the COVID-19 pandemic: key themes and future research agenda

PurposeUndoubtedly, coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has released unprecedented disruptions and health crisis on people and activities everywhere. The impacts extend to public–private partnership (PPP) arrangements in the construction industry. Concomitantly, PPP pacts are contributing to combat the pandemic. However, literature on the PPP concept in the COVID-19 era remain under-researched. This study aims to review the current literature on PPPs in the COVID-19 pandemic and present the key themes, research gaps and future research directions.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, 29 highly relevant literature were sourced from Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed search engines within the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology. With the aid of qualitative content analysis, the 29 articles were critically analysed leading to the extraction of hot research themes on PPPs in the coronavirus pandemic.FindingsThe results of the SLR produced eight themes such as major changes in PPP contracts, development of the COVID-19 vaccines, economic recession, facemasks and testing kits, governance and sustainability of PPPs. In addition, the study reveals seven research gaps that need further investigations among the scientific research community on mental health and post-pandemic recovery plans.Research limitations/implicationsThe articles selected for this review were limited to only peer-reviewed journal papers written in English excluding conference papers. This restriction may have taken out some relevant literature but they had insignificant impact on the overall outcome of this research.Practical implicationsTo improve the understanding of practitioners in the construction industry on key issues on PPPs in the COVID-19 pandemic, the study provides them a checklist of relevant themes.Originality/valueAs a novel literature review relating PPPs to the coronavirus, it sets the foundation for further research and contributes to practical measures to control the virus.

Some STIs spike, but the declines are just as concerning

Decreasing cases of chlamydia may offer false hope in light of decreased screening "Stay home, save lives" and social distancing have been common tag-lines over the last 2 years, but some public health experts are adding "We're back to the 80s" to the mix, specifically in terms of rising cases of sexually transmitted infections (STI) to levels not seen in decades. Social distancing may have helped by limiting sexual activity and exposure to new partners, but it may also have resulted in delayed care for many people, according to CDC.3 There is also a suspicion that better treatment of HIV/AIDs has led to a more laissez-faire attitude about STIs in general. Since the virus no longer carries a death sentence for many, the u-shaped curve that cases of STIs have shown in the last few decades reflects a potential drop in concern. "Chlamydia dropped because it is only caught through screening, but we know that pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility have also dropped since large-scale chlamydia screening started up again.

Dancing Plague: Archives of Celebration and Care in Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane's Secret Pastures

Following the cancellation of influential contemporary choreographer Bill T. Jones's highly anticipated return to the stage in spring 2020, Jones reflected that COVID-19 was his "second plague." In referencing the AIDS epidemic that upended his career and personal life, Jones located methods of enduring not in the "unprecedented" present, but in the past. This essay considers the irreverent and buoyant Secret Pastures (1984), a work that reemerged as streaming media during the pandemic, as part of Jones's AIDS repertory. I describe how Secret Pastures' artistic and social archives, and the collaboration and friendship among Jones, Arnie Zane, Keith Haring, Peter Gordon, and Willi Smith documented therein, contain crucial practices of queer survival, particularly that of "alongsidedness." The essay argues that contexts for endurance can be found in the allegedly frivolous, glamorous, playful, humorous, and excessive aesthetics of Secret Pastures as much as they can be identified in, and more typically are ascribed to, more formalist, austere, and tonally serious works like D-Man in the Waters (1989) and Still/Here (1994). Modeling a toolkit of perseverance and flourishing, Secret Pastures reorients popular and academic views of minoritarian, particularly Black, and queer art and life as structured through trauma and scarcity. Secret Pastures shows how the onstage performance serves as a context for offstage friendships. Amid the ongoing hostilities of government abandonment, homophobia, white supremacy, and viral attack, art-making functions as a laboratory for modes of relationality that can endure.

The Impacts of Social and Political Upheaval on Older Adults' Sexuality: A Call to Action

Sexuality educator and author Jane Fleishman discusses the need to focus on sexual pleasure instead of sexual dysfunction for older adults. She exhorts her readers to notice the impact of current political and social upheaval, the pandemic, the recent Dobbs decision, and the concomitant racial violence, climate change, political crises, technological divides, as well as the healthcare system's inconsistencies, which have laid bare disparities, particularly for vulnerable older adults. She encourages scholars, researchers, students, and policy makers to embrace the intersections, develop new tools, and focus on marginalized populations.

Editorial Comment: Pathologies, Performance, and Promiscuous Care

5 The authors are cautious about drawing too-easy parallels between the two pandemics, citing, for example, Marc Arthur's point that "there was never a race for a cure or vaccine to end AIDS like there is for COVID-19" (Anderson and Ybarra;Nereson);they also emphasize that the HIV and AIDS pandemic is ongoing.6 But the callousness on vivid display in the United States over the past two years, which ensured that COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, the elderly, the immunocompromised, the incarcerated, and the poor, recalls the cruelty of public health policies during the first wave of HIV and AIDS. The issue opens with Anderson's and Ybarra's essay.11 It triangulates the first wave of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, performance theory, and the COVID-19 pandemic to trace how the legacies of queer care that emerged in response to HIV and AIDS circulate powerfully in our discipline today. "12 Anderson and Ybarra "contend that it is not merely coincidental that performance theory would elaborate such a claim within the context of the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic … not because they have a causal or direct connection, but because they point to the same urgent question: 'Someone is dying in front of your eyes. What are you going to do about it?'" They go on to trace the complex legacies of queer care as practiced (and refused) at the 2022 American Society of Theatre Research annual conference in San Diego.

Is This Ballroom a Bathhouse? The Promise and Peril of Coming Together

This essay examines queer responses to the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic alongside public health practices at a recent ASTR conference held during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors focus especially on the period between the identification of the HIV virus in 1983 and the first availability of protease inhibitors in 1996. Within this period, queer practices of care in the face of government neglect engaged with performance, and in retrospect were themselves a form of performance theory that literalized performance studies' fixation on liveness and mortality. As the authors revisit archives, including public health videos, memoirs, congressional hearings, and queer criticism from the 1980s and '90s, they reconsider the work of Cindy Patton, David Román, Douglas Crimp, Eric Michaels, Gary Fisher, Herbert Blau, and Reza Abdoh in the elaboration of performance as vital to the collective project of public health.

Incidence and Risk Factors for Comorbidities Following COVID-19 Disease in People Living with HIV

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: COVID-19 disproportionately affects patients with prior health conditions and those living at a lower socioeconomic status. Persons living with HIV (PLWH) are infected with SARS-CoV-2 at a higher rate than seronegative patients. Risk factors and incidence of post-COVID-19 comorbidities in PLWH, specifically, are still unknown METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We will study PLWH enrolled in the Emory Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) Registry who receive care at the Grady Ponce de Leon Center in Atlanta, Georgia to 1) investigate the incidence of, and 2) identify risk factors that predispose PLWH to post-COVID-19 comorbidities. All PLWH with documented COVID-19 (by positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR or antigen test) between March 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021, with a clinic visit within 12 months will be included. We will identify comorbidities using problem list diagnoses and ICD9/10 codes. With a predicted sample size of 395, we will use a Cox proportional hazards model for time-to-detection of comorbidity, and bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models to identify predictors of incident comorbidity within 12 months of COVID-19. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: o Previous work demonstrated that in PLWH, age and non-AIDS comorbidities, but not HIV-related factors, were associated with hospitalization for COVID-19 in a dose dependent fashion.18 We anticipate that rate of incident comorbidities will be significantly higher in PLWH after COVID-19 compared to PLWH without a history of COVID-19. We also expect that pre-existing comorbidities including obesity and cardiovascular disease, male sex, Black race, and older age are associated with higher incidence of post-COVID-19 comorbidities in PLWH. When stratifying by organ system, we also anticipate that prior comorbidities of an organ system will predispose patients to later complications of that same system. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: By understanding the incidence and risk factors associated with developing post-COVID-19 comorbiditieswe can improve guidelines for treatment of groups experiencing the disproportionate impact of co-infection with HIV and SARS-CoV-2.

Incorporation of awareness programs into a model of the spread of HIV/AIDS among people who inject drugs

Mathematical modeling techniques have been used extensively during the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic. Drug injection causes increased HIV spread in most countries globally. The media is crucial in spreading health awareness by changing mixing behavior. The published studies show some of the ways that differential equation models can be employed to explain how media awareness programs influence the spread and containment of disease (Greenhalgh et al. Appl Math Comput. 2015;251:539–563). Here we build a differential equation model which shows how disease awareness programs can alter the HIV prevalence in a group of people who inject drugs (PWIDs). This builds on previous work by Greenhalgh and Hay (1997) and Liang et al. (2016). We have constructed a mathematical model to describe the improved model that reduces the spread of the diseases through the effect of awareness of disease on sharing needles and syringes among the PWID population. The model supposes that PWIDs clean their needles before use rather than after. We carry out a steady state analysis and examine local stability. Our discussion has been focused on two ways of studying the influence of awareness of infection levels in epidemic modeling. The key biological parameter of our model is the basic reproductive number R0$$ {R}_0 $$. R0$$ {R}_0 $$ is a crucial number which determines the behavior of the infection. We find that if R0$$ {R}_0 $$ is less than one then the disease-free steady state is the unique steady state and moreover whatever the initial fraction of infected individuals then the disease will die out as time becomes large. If R0$$ {R}_0 $$ exceeds one there is the disease-free steady state and a unique steady state with disease present. We also showed that the disease-free steady state is locally asymptotically stable if R0$$ {R}_0 $$ is less than one, neutrally stable if R0$$ {R}_0 $$ is equal to one and unstable if R0$$ {R}_0 $$ exceeds one. In the last case, when R0$$ {R}_0 $$ is greater than one the endemic steady state was locally asymptotically stable. Our analytical results are confirmed by using simulation with realistic parameter values. In nontechnical terms, the number R0$$ {R}_0 $$ is a critical value describing how the disease will spread. If R0$$ {R}_0 $$ is less than or equal to one then the disease will always die out but if R0$$ {R}_0 $$ exceeds one and disease is present the disease will sustain itself and moreover the numbers of PWIDs with disease will tend to a unique nonzero value.

Pengetahuan HIV/AIDS dan Faktor Keterlibatan dalam Hubungan Romantik serta Ketertarikan Seks Sesama Jantina : Kajian Kes dalam kalangan Mahasiswa Gay

Kajian ini bertujuan meneroka pengetahuan mahasiswa tentang risiko jangkitan HIV/AIDS, faktor keterlibatan dalam hubungan romantik dan ketertarikan seks sesama jantina. Masih kurang kajian yang memberi tumpuan kepada amalan hubungan romantik dan ketertarikan seks sesama jantina serta kesedaran mahasiswa tentang HIV/AIDS impak daripada tingkah laku seks berisiko ini. Banyak kajian terdahulu lebih menumpu kepada faktor keterlibatan dalam hubungan romantik dan ketertarikan seks sesama jantina tanpa mengaitkannya dengan kesedaran mahasiswa gay terhadap jangkitan HIV. Kajian ini menggunakan pendekatan kajian kes dan direkabentuk bersesuaian kaedah kajian kualitatif. Seramai empat informan dalam kalangan mahasiswa Institusi Pengajian Tinggi di Malaysia yang membuat pengakuan identiti gay telah terlibat dalam kajian ini. Pemilihan informan adalah menggunakan teknik Persampelan Snow Ball. Pengumpulan data telah dijalankan secara atas talian dengan menggunakan medium Google Meet. Semua informan ditemubual dalam talian secara konferen video. Data temu bual dianalisis menggunakan analisis tematik. Hasil analisis menunjukkan terdapat empat faktor risiko keterlibatan mahasiswa dalam hubungan romantik dan tingkah laku seksual sesama jantina iaitu (i) pengalaman menjadi mangsa gangguan seksual semasa kecil, (ii) faktor naluri semulajadi, (iii) pengaruh rakan/komuniti berisiko gay dan (iv) pengaruh negatif daripada media sosial dan internet. Informan juga mempunyai pengetahuan asas tentang risiko jangkitan HIV. Walau bagaimanapun, kesemua informan percaya tingkah laku mereka mempunyai risiko rendah dan tidak mudah untuk dijangkiti HIV. Salah faham tentang risiko jangkitan HIV bagi seks tidak selamat dan seks luar tabi' dipercayai mendorong amalan hubungan seks sesama jantina dilakukan tanpa rasa takut dan menurunnya keprihatinan kepada seks selamat dalam kalangan mahasiswa gay. Kajian mencadangkan salah faham tentang risiko jangkitan HIV sebagai faktor baharu penyebab amalan seks sesama jantina yang berterusan dalam kalangan informan yang dikaji. Intervensi perlu dibentuk bersesuaian faktor risiko hubungan romantik dan tingkah laku seksual sesama jantina agar ia dapat dibendung daripada menular dalam kalangan mahasiswa gay.Alternate :This study aims to explore the knowledge of HIV/AIDS infection risk and the factors that contribute to same-sex romantic relationship involvement and same-sex sexual attractions among university students. Less studies have been done focusing on same-sex romantic relationships and same-sex sexual attraction among self-identified gay university students and their awareness of the HIV/AIDS impact due to risky sexual behaviour. Many previous studies were found to focus only on gay students' romantic relationships and samesex sexual attraction involvement factors without relating these factors with their awareness of HIV infection. This study uses a case study approach and is designed following qualitative research methods. Four students who self-identified as gay were selected as informants. Snow Ball Sampling is used as the informants' selection technique. Data collection was conducted online using the Google Meet platform. All informants were interviewed online via video conference. The thematic analysis has been used to analyse the interview data. The study analysis demonstrated four risk factors conduce to a same-sex romantic relationship and samesex sexual behaviours among gay students: (i) sexual abuse experienced during childhood;(ii) same-sex sexual attraction as an instinct factor;(iii) gay friends/community influenced and (iv) internet and social media negative influence. All informants are identified to have basic HIV risk infection knowledge. However, those in a same-sex relationship believe same-sex romantic relationships and same-sex sexual practices have a low risk of HIV infection. The misunderstanding of HIV infection in same-sex sexual practices and unsafe sex is believed to contribute to a consistent no fear of same-sex sexual practices and less concern towards safe sex among ay students. This study suggests a misunderstanding of HIV infection as the new factor contributing to continuous same-sex sexual practices among studied informants. Intervention needs to be developed tailored to the same-sex romantic relationship and same-sex sexual attraction risk factors to curb the spread among gay students.

On the Lateness of Pandemic Time

This article applies the Black queer vernacular form of "late" to interrogate arrival the of a privileged group into a consciousness of crisis and recasts the actions of Black LGBTQ+ people during the pandemic as part of a longer history of surviving catastrophe. The colloquial usage of late demonstrates Black queer awareness of the interconnection between the definition of time;its variable valuation;and the multiple, sometimes competing temporalities in which Black queers live and die. Racial disparities to the response of policies implemented during the rise of COVID-19, as well as the ways in which the habits and pace of Black LGBTQ+ life remained relatively unaffected by the pandemic, reveal the ways history and time unevenly impact different populations within the same crisis. Using Black studies theories of time, Black feminist theories of touch, and Black queer theories of gender and sex, this article illuminates the continuity between constructions of state-sanctioned notions of progress, a contemporary development of pandemic time, and the timing of whiteness as ontologically late. Through a reconsideration of the habits of Black queer life as always already attending to one urgency or another this article argues for building toward a crisis-oriented futurity with less concern for or and impulse to redress the lateness of other people.

On Digital Models: Responding to Viral Metaphors in Pandemic Times

COVID-19 has been a crisis represented and interpreted through models. Models are metaphors that illustrate one phenomenon in and through another that is better understood or seemingly more transparent. In this article, we consider digitally driven COVID-19 models that draw on the certainty of data from smartphones and social networks to make predictions about a poorly understood virus. Network data normally used to model information spread drive models of an actually existing biological virus. A return to HIV network models of the 1980s helps map the social implications of this latest turn to modeling. These earlier models were used to hone stigmatizing viral metaphors about behavior, risk, and exposure, in the shadow of an emerging digital culture. Thinking across COVID-19 and HIV modeling demonstrates how models can support personal responsibilization, be used to blame "bad” actors, and justify the creep of new surveillance practices under the rubric of "Data for Good” programs. Drawing on critical HIV and queer studies, we argue that the people and behaviors that are opaque to viral models and their methods of capture present potential avenues for speaking back to digital virality's terms. We highlight these exceptions, which show how certain lives make trouble for models and their sensibilities, telling of queer forms of life, desire, and contact that evade modeling altogether.

Guest editorial

Corporate governance and sustainable development in Africa The African continent faces many challenges including extreme poverty, rampant corruption, human rights abuses, environmental degradation (due to extractive industry activities), extreme inequalities, HIV/AIDS, conflicts and weak rule of law. In the context of these many challenges, Africa is strongly featured in the UN 2030 Sustainable Development agenda as most vulnerable and deserving special attention (United Nations General Assembly, 2015). [...]SDGs are particularly relevant to Africa among other development countries. NEPAD in particular, an initiative by the African leadership, emphasises the importance of good governance for achieving sustainable development in Africa and sets out principles to strengthen, not only political governance, but also economic and corporate governance (Hope, 2005). [...]there has always been acceptance that effective firm-level corporate governance is paramount in supporting sustainable development in Africa on the continent (Hope, 2005). Most studies examining the impact of corporate governance in African firms' decision-making processes have focused on firm performance (Mangena et al., 2012;Darko et al., 2016;Assenga et al., 2018;Erena et al., 2022;Abang'a et al., 2022) and corporate reporting (Waweru et al., 2019;Chijoke-Mgbame et al., 2020). [...]our knowledge about whether and how corporate governance contributes to the SDGs or sustainable development principles in Africa remains very limited.

When We're Coming From: What Would an HIV Doula Do? on Pandemic Time(s)

"When We're Coming From" is a conversation across time and place among a group of writers and artists who are members of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? Collective. Seven of us have come together to have an asynchronous conversation about how our decades-long work to respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic shapes our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we share six individual assessments of pandemic time to suggest ways that pandemics(s) shape our sense of time(s). What follows are our meditations on how and when we see ourselves, and the transitions of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19: "AIDS out of time," bent time, "time-is-money," palimpsests, syndemic time, and the long haul.

Editors' Note

Angela Townes essay, A Feminist Sexology Perspective on the Multifunctional Clitoris: Dispelling the Sole Purpose Myth, demonstrates how progressive efforts to celebrate the clitoriss functional role in sexual pleasure have inadvertently foreclosed its multifunctionality. Because global health crises overlap with capitalism's crises, time-is-money. Osman's series of color drawings extend the public health practice of social distancing to consider the broader social divisions that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Introduction: In Search of Hope amid Despair in Folklore of Epidemics

Facing the outbreak of an unprecedented pandemic, along with a disturbing sociopolitical environment, folklorists should and can reflect upon what we have done within our discipline and what we can contribute to the discourse and public understanding of such realities with folkloristic perspectives. This introduction intends to define the study of folklore of epidemics as a new research area, building upon the studies of disaster folklore and ethnic minority folklore. It also discusses issues of marginalization, minoritization, and invisibility in folklore studies as a reflection of systemic racism in folkloristics as well as in broader society where the victimization of minorities and low-income class during the COVID-19 pandemic has been ultimately exposed.

"This Time is Crisis Time”: A Syndemic Approach

Editors' Introduction to 6.1.

Global Dynamics of a Within-Host COVID-19/AIDS Coinfection Model with Distributed Delays

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Among people with AIDS, cases of COVID-19 have been reported in many countries. COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In this manuscript, we are going to present a within-host COVID-19/AIDS coinfection model to study the dynamics and influence of the coinfection between COVID-19 and AIDS. The model is a six-dimensional delay differential equation that describes the interaction between uninfected epithelial cells, infected epithelial cells, free SARS-CoV-2 particles, uninfected CD4+ T cells, infected CD4+ T cells, and free HIV-1 particles. We demonstrated that the proposed model is biologically acceptable by proving the positivity and boundedness of the model solutions. The global stability analysis of the model is carried out in terms of the basic reproduction number. Numerical simulations are carried out to investigate that if COVID-19/AIDS coinfected individuals have a poor immune response or a low number of CD4+ T cells, then the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 and the number of infected epithelial cells will rise. On the contrary, the existence of time delays can rise the number of uninfected CD4+ T cells and uninfected epithelial cells, thus reducing the viral load within the host.

Writing the History of Pandemics in the Age of COVID-19

Since early 2020, pundits and commentators have scrutinized the history of past pandemics for answers to a series of questions shaped by COVID-19: what strategies have worked in the past to stem the spread of contagion? How long do epidemics typically last? Are vaccines an effective "magic bullet” against infectious diseases? The coronavirus crisis spawned comparisons to diseases as epidemiologically diverse as influenza, the Black Death, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and polio, as people excavated the records of past pandemics to try to make sense of the worst public-health disaster for over a century.1 Policy proscriptions emerged quickly from these historical analogies. Many public-health experts pointed to the trajectories of epidemics like the 1918–19 influenza outbreak and SARS to convey the gravity of what would happen if political leaders did not quickly and decisively issue stay-at-home-orders, close schools, and mandate social distancing.2

STIGMA ASSOCIATED WITH COVID-19: INSIGHTS FROM SURVIVORS AT A REHABILITATION CENTRE IN HARARE, ZIMBABWE

Pandemics have been around for ages such as leprosy which was first discovered in Europe in the Middle Ages. Pandemics also created stigma related to disease. Like leprosy, COVID-19 is one of the worst pandemics the world has experienced. The research 's aim was to find out the stigma associated with COVID-19 and survivors ' lived experiences at a rehabilitation Center in Harare. Qualitative research using the phenomenological design was used. Convenience sampling was the sampling technique used. Participants were a sample of six comprising three of each gender who were survivors of COVID-19. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted. Themes were generated from the participants' responses. Participants reported experiencing stigma from the community including their own relatives in the form of labelling, experiencing a sense of not belonging, anger leading to being lonely. Participants' families also suffered stigma by association. The participants' faith in God including praying gave them hope while others experienced despair. Recommendations such as pre and post counselling to anyone being tested for COVID-19, awareness campaigns about stigma and more research on stigma related to disease should be conducted by universities together with the media, public and enlist private sector support to holistically deal with it.

Factors in Predicting and Preventing Conspiracy Theory Endorsement: An Empirical Review

Conspiracy theories are part of mainstream American thought. The profile of a conspiracy theorist is no longer that of a cynical, paranoid, and morally deficient individual but is rather more complex. A relatively recent surge in research on conspiracist ideation and conspiracy theories portrays a dynamic and sometimes contradictory web of factors which include demographic, personality, situational, cultural, and cognitive components all contributing to belief in conspiracy theories. This review works to compile the findings that have empirical consensus, highlight some of the contradictions, and propose a more dynamic theoretical approach and research strategy to incorporate cultural factors into our understanding of, belief in, and consequences of, conspiracy theories.