COVID-19 Related Stress Reactions in Patients with Obsessive - Compulsive Disorder

Background: With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a large percentage of the world's population has been exposed to multiple burdens, including immediate hazards such as the risk of infection as well as social isolation, and economic insecurity. Based on the diathesis-stress model, which helps explain the development and maintenance of many mental disorders, these stresses may particularly affect people with preexisting mental disorders. In this study, we aimed to assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with OCD and healthy individuals. Results: According to OCSS, 23.9% of our participants were having mild OCD symptoms, 41.6% of them were having moderate symptoms, and severe symptoms presented in 34.5% of them. Our results revealed that there was a high statistically significant increase in total CSS scores in the OCD group compared to the control group. Conclusion: The results of the present study supported the notion that the increase in symptoms and general severity observed among those with OCD might primarily be due to stress induced by the current pandemic. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Arab Journal of Psychiatry is the property of Arab Federation of Psychiatrists and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Predictive Modeling of Stress in the Healthcare Industry During COVID-19: A Novel Approach Using XGBoost, SHAP Values, and Tree Explainer

There was a substantial medicine shortage and an increase in morbidity due to the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. This pandemic has also had a drastic impact on healthcare professionals' psychological health as they were surrounded by suffering, death, and isolation. Healthcare practitioners in North India were sent a self-administered questionnaire based on the COVID-19 Stress Scale (N = 436) from March to May 2021. With 10-fold cross-validation, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) was used to predict the individual stress levels. XGBoost classifier was applied, and classification accuracy was 88%. The results of this research show that approximately 52.6% of healthcare specialists in the dataset exceed the severe psychiatric morbidity standards. Further, to determine which attribute had a significant impact on stress prediction, advanced techniques (SHAP values), and tree explainer were applied. The two most significant stress predictors were found to be medicine shortage and trouble in concentrating.

Mediating Effect of Autistic Traits between the Emotional Impact of Pandemic and Depressive Symptoms

Background. The pandemic is having a significant impact on mental health, especially in vulnerable groups. Method. A conditional analysis was carried out with a population of 185 people. The study population did not have any psychiatric diagnosis, they are people without autism. The age of the participants ranges between 18 and 72 years (M = 31.43;SD = 16.26). The mediating role of autistic traits and the moderating role of age between the emotional impact of the pan-demic and depressive symptoms are analyzed. Results. The results demonstrate a significant influence of age and emo-tional impact of the pandemic on the depressive symptoms. The mediating variable autistic traits was also significant. Conclusions. These results point to the younger population with autistic traits as particularly vulnerable.

Effects of ICT Integration in Teaching Using Learning Activities

Progress in schooling using competence-based teaching for students is a priority in setting up a quality-centered educational process. Thus, using ICT tools as teaching–learning techniques represents an important objective in reaching scholastic performance and the capacity to offer students various experiences in teaching. Starting with an analysis of research on integrating ICT tools in the educational environment, this study is aimed at presenting teaching opportunities for all students, seeing education through the lens of those instruments specific to a secondary school level, referencing the subject of geography. The applied research design includes mixed methods applied to a total of 674 students, based on results received before and after a written evaluation, to determine the level of knowledge of the students. The present study evaluates the learning environment in which a successful and practical integration of ICT tools is anticipated in the teaching and learning process, from the perspective of the comparative measurement of the impact on the tests, resulting from the formative assessment. The conducted experiment and the Google Forms questionnaires suggest, through the degree of involvement of all students, how technology can facilitate the teaching–learning process. The results showed that there are statistically significant differences between the experimental and the control group, and that information and communication technologies (ICT) represent an important tool for improving performance and developing participatory skills, having the ability to provide students with positive results.

Convolutional Neural Network for COVID-19 Detection

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, with a zero-patient emerging to millions in few months, has spread across countries and is approaching nearly 280 million of cases worldwide. Billions of check kits are given to hospitals because of exploding cases of COVID-19. Hence, it becomes necessary to implement automatic detection system to restrain COVID-19 spreading. Here, we have demonstrated a convolutional neural network (CNN) model which is trained on X-ray, CT scan images of chest cavity collected from totally different sources to foretell COVID-19 patients and healthy persons. The model is thereby connected to a Web application, which is be made by using Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Cascaded Style Sheet (CSS), JavaScript (JS), jQuery, ECMA Script (ES6), and Flask (Python). The model will be providing us the probability so that huge numbers of tests can be done in few clicks with available medical scans. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Validation of the Hungarian Version of the COVID Stress Scale (CSS-H).

(1) Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented and has affected every social class. The prevalence of moderate-to-severe stress and anxiety levels in the general population was reported to be 25%. This study aimed to describe the validation of the Hungarian version of the COVID Stress Scale. (2) Methods: The research study was a cross-section validation study with a representative sample (N = 1200) and a non-representative student sample (N = 350). The translation procedure was a four-step procedure. The interviewers conducted the data collection. (3) Results: The reliability of the Hungarian CSS was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Convergent validity was evaluated by correlating the CSS with the PSS and WHO-WBI5. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the CSS-H factors was between 0.844 and 0.907 (representative sample) and between 0.878 and 0.936 (student sample), which qualified as very good. The reliability of the internal consistency was good for all six factors in both samples. The CSS-H total and all-domain scores significantly and positively correlated with the PSS total score and negatively correlated with well-being. (4) Conclusions: The Hungarian COVID Stress Scale is a valid, reliable instrument to measure COVID-19-related distress in the Hungarian population.

Predictive Modeling of Stress in the Healthcare Industry during COVID-19: A Novel Approach Using XGBoost, SHAP Values, and Tree Explainer

There was a substantial medicine shortage and an increase in morbidity due to the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. This pandemic has also had a drastic impact on healthcare professionals' psychological health as they were surrounded by suffering, death, and isolation. Healthcare practitioners in North India were sent a self-administered questionnaire based on the COVID-19 Stress Scale (N = 436) from March to May 2021. With 10-fold cross-validation, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) was used to predict the individual stress levels. XGBoost classifier was applied, and classification accuracy was 88%. The results of this research show that approximately 52.6% of healthcare specialists in the dataset exceed the severe psychiatric morbidity standards. Further, to determine which attribute had a significant impact on stress prediction, advanced techniques (SHAP values), and tree explainer were applied. The two most significant stress predictors were found to be medicine shortage and trouble in concentrating. © 2022 IGI Global. All rights reserved.

Impact of the time of surgical delay on survival in patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Background and objectives: Patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) often experience a waiting period before radical surgery for numerous reasons; however, the COVID-19 outbreak has exacerbated this problem. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the impact of the unavoidable time of surgical delay on the outcome of patients with MIBC. Methods: In all, 165 patients from high-volume centers with pT2-pT3 MIBC, who underwent radical surgery between January 2008 and November 2020, were retrospectively evaluated. Patients' demographic and pathological information was recorded. Based on the time of surgical delay endured, patients were divided into three groups: long waiting time (> 90 days), intermediate waiting time (30-90 days), and short waiting time (≤ 30 days). Finally, each group's pathological characteristics and survival rates were compared. Results: The median time of surgical delay for all patients was 33 days (interquartile range, IQR: 16-67 days). Among the 165 patients, 32 (19.4%) were classified into the long waiting time group, 55 (33.3%) into the intermediate waiting time group, and 78 (47.3%) into the short waiting time group. The median follow-up period for all patients was 48 months (IQR: 23-84 months). The median times of surgical delay in the long, intermediate, and short waiting time groups were 188 days (IQR: 98-367 days), 39 days (IQR: 35-65 days), and 16 days (IQR: 12-22 days), respectively. The 5-year overall survival (OS) rate for all patients was 58.4%, and that in the long, intermediate, and short waiting time groups were 35.7%, 61.3%, and 64.1%, respectively (P = 0.035). The 5-year cancer-specific survival (CSS) rates in the long, intermediate, and short waiting time groups were 38.9%, 61.5%, and 65.0%, respectively (P = 0.042). The multivariate Cox regression analysis identified age, time of surgical delay, pT stage, and lymph node involvement as independent determinants of OS and CSS. Conclusion: In patients with pT2-pT3 MIBC, the time of surgical delay > 90 days can have a negative impact on survival.

A Web Knowledge-Driven Multimodal Retrieval Method in Computational Social Systems: Unsupervised and Robust Graph Convolutional Hashing

Multimodal retrieval has received widespread consideration since it can commendably provide massive related data support for the development of computational social systems (CSSs). However, the existing works still face the following challenges: 1) rely on the tedious manual marking process when extended to CSS, which not only introduces subjective errors but also consumes abundant time and labor costs;2) only using strongly aligned data for training, lacks concern for the adjacency information, which makes the poor robustness and semantic heterogeneity gap difficult to be effectively fit;and 3) mapping features into real-valued forms, which leads to the characteristics of high storage and low retrieval efficiency. To address these issues in turn, we have designed a multimodal retrieval framework based on web-knowledge-driven, called unsupervised and robust graph convolutional hashing (URGCH). The specific implementations are as follows: first, a "secondary semantic self-fusion" approach is proposed, which mainly extracts semantic-rich features through pretrained neural networks, constructs the joint semantic matrix through semantic fusion, and eliminates the process of manual marking;second, a "adaptive computing" approach is designed to construct enhanced semantic graph features through the knowledge-infused of neighborhoods and uses graph convolutional networks for knowledge fusion coding, which enables URGCH to sufficiently fit the semantic modality gap while obtaining satisfactory robustness features;Third, combined with hash learning, the multimodality data are mapped into the form of binary code, which reduces storage requirements and improves retrieval efficiency. Eventually, we perform plentiful experiments on the web dataset. The results evidence that URGCH exceeds other baselines about 1%-3.7% in mean average precisions (MAPs), displays superior performance in all the aspects, and can meaningfully provide multimodal data retrieval services to CSS.

Case Report: Secondary Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis (sHLH) and Candida auris Fungemia in Post-acute COVID-19 Syndrome: A Clinical Challenge.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection causes a disease (COVID-19) with multisystem involvement. The world is now entering a phase of post-COVID-19 manifestations in this pandemic. Secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (sHLH) is a life-threatening hyperinflammatory event triggered by viral infections, including SARS-CoV-2. Both Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome-Adults (MIS-A) and Cytokine Storm Syndrome (CSS) are considered close differentials of sHLH and add to the spectrum of Post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PACS). In this report, we presented the case of a middle-aged Asian man who was initially discharged upon recovery from severe COVID-19 infection after 17 days of hospitalization to a private institute and later came to our hospital 13 days post-discharge. Here, he was diagnosed with sHLH, occurring as an extension of CSS, with delayed presentation falling within the spectrum of PACS. The diagnosis of sHLH was made holistically with the HLH-2004 criteria. Our patient initially responded to intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) and dexamethasone, later complicated by disseminated Candida auris infection and had a fatal outcome. Though many cases of HLH during active COVID-19 and a few cases post COVID-19 recovery have been reported, based on H-score, which has limitations as a diagnostic tool. We report the first case report of post-COVID-19 sHLH using the HLH-2004 criteria, complicated by disseminated Candidemia, emphasizing that the care of patients with COVID-19 does not conclude at the time of hospital discharge. We highlight the importance of surveillance in the post-COVID phase for early detection of sHLH which may predispose to fatal opportunistic infections (OIs).

Scanning the VIRUS: A study of dimensions of stress and coping with COVID-19.

The current research examines the psychosocial stressors that Indians are facing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, using a self-constructed COVID-19 Stress Scale (CSS). It also assesses the coping strategies being used currently. The sample comprised of 1009 Indians ranging between 17 and 83 years. The items of the CSS were constructed based on a review of existing scales, expert evaluations, and participant interviews. The factor structure of COVID-19 Stress Scale (CSS) was examined through the use of an exploratory factor analysis. Several psychometric tests were conducted to ascertain its reliability and validity properties. Results suggest a five-factor structure: Vexation with Others, Immediate Concerns, Routine Disruption, Uncertainty about the Future, and Systemic stressors (abbreviated as VIRUS) explaining 55.269% of the total variance in COVID-19 stress. Coefficient alphas for the entire scale (0.90) and for each of the five factors, ranging from 0.69-0.85, indicate satisfactory internal consistency. One-way analysis of variance was done to assess the differences among emotion-focused, problem-solving, and seeking social support coping strategy. Correlations were calculated between various coping strategies and COVID-19 Stress. Results suggested that seeking social support was the most used coping strategy. No significant correlation was found between the use of any coping strategy and COVID-19 stress. The proposed VIRUS model adequately captures the stressful experience of COVID-19. COVID-19 Stress Scale (CSS), a 21-item scale has robust psychometric properties.

Why do they go to the peripheries? Studying the relations between the real estate market and coworking spaces in the peripheral areas of Germany

Purpose>The study was designed to investigate the bidirectional causation between the real estate market characteristics (residential property prices/rents (including PTR), office rents) and the rise of coworking spaces (CSs) in the peripheral areas of Germany.Design/methodology/approach>Based on the desk research, the authors constructed their own database of 1,201 CSs. The authors gathered data on the residential and office prices and rents on a district level. To identify real market differences between districts with and without CSs, the authors applied the t-test for independent samples.Findings>The second-highest number of CSs were found to operate in the office market peripheries. This phenomenon should be explained by a search for lower office rents, which CSs seek. Most CSs in the peripheral areas of Germany were only recently established in tourist-oriented regions in the south and north of Germany. In this paper, the authors confirmed that the strength of peripheral CSs lies in the hybridity of their operations: for the majority of CSs, running a CS is a non-core business. The authors argue that the role of CSs is rather limited in attracting real estate investors and boosting the real estate market in the peripheral areas of Germany.Practical implications>The research shows that peripheral locations are attracting CSs to significant extent. The study shows that CSs can be part of corporate real estate or workplace strategies. As the majority of peripheral CSs are located in tourism areas, the subletting of vacant spaces could be a lucrative business model for hotels, particularly in the times of pandemics. Therefore, further research should focus on the role of tourist areas in the implementation of CSs model.Originality/value>The focus of this study (CSs in peripheral areas) is original. Additionally, applying the real estate perspective to study the location of CSs is novel as well.

Covid Contentment Contribution

An old age home is a facility or home for elderly individuals who do not have family to care for them. It's like a home for the elderly, with all the necessities such as a place to live, food, and clothing. The organizers of the house were in charge of these people's fundamental needs. Organizers gather items from donors or, in some cases, hunt for donations to meet the needs for elders. This project is a website that will make collecting donations for an elderly age home easy for organizers. Money, food, clothing, and other items are routinely donated to nursing homes. People would be able to distinguish and donate these products independently using this website. In the majority of situations, elders utilize pharmaceuticals on a regular basis;this website also includes information about the medications used by residents of old age homes.

Coronavirus Visual Dashboard and Data Repository: COVID-19

This research paper talks about the site advancement and the most hazardous and pandemic infection COVID-19. We are additionally examining the Steps followed for making a site. We analyze diverse site advancement web applications. What is more, we examine a daily existence cycle and system of advancement of web applications. In this report, different audit papers’ results likewise included for comprehension of issues can be looked at by the client for making a site and furthermore the issues looked by this infection. This Research Paper discusses the advances utilized in the improvement of site, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and clarified in outcome its usefulness with its structures (i.e., Nodejs, Expressjs) with screen captures. It is trusted it will give a valuable system for managing the cycle. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

CoviFight: A COVID-19 Resource Tracker Website with Location-wise Search using Web Scraping

With the COVID-19 pandemic establishing its reign world-wide in the last two years with over 260 million cases and more than 5 million deaths, there has been an incessant need to quell the increasing fear and anxiety which has taken root in the minds of people. One way to do this has been to create an awareness about the global pandemic and arm people with a way to track various indispensable resources during these tough times. This paper discusses, in detail, the implementation of this idea - a real-time, COVID-19 resource tracker website which scrapes data from the most favored social media, Twitter and collates them to display the relevant information about the resources related to COVID-19;and provides vital particulars and facts about donation sites (in real-time) and general guidance in symptoms, treatments and precautions - integrated into an all-in-one website equipped with auto-completion feature and a handy navigation to increase its user friendly nature. © 2022 IEEE

Implications of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Systemic Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis.

Systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis (sJIA) is a serious multifactorial autoinflammatory disease with a significant mortality rate due to macrophage activation syndrome (MAS). Recent research has deepened the knowledge about the pathophysiological mechanisms of sJIA-MAS, facilitating new targeted treatments, and biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (bDMARDs), which significantly changed the course of the disease and prognosis. This review highlights that children are less likely to suffer severe COVID-19 infection, but at approximately 2-4 weeks, some cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) have been reported, with a fulminant course. Previous established treatments for cytokine storm syndrome (CSS) have guided COVID-19 therapeutics. sJIA-MAS is different from severe cases of COVID-19, a unique immune process in which a huge release of cytokines will especially flood the lungs. In this context, MIS-C should be reinterpreted as a special MAS, and long-term protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection can only be provided by the vaccine, but we do not yet have sufficient data. COVID-19 does not appear to have a substantial impact on rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs) activity in children treated with bDMARDs, but the clinical features, severity and outcome in these patients under various drugs are not yet easy to predict. Multicenter randomized controlled trials are still needed to determine when and by what means immunoregulatory products should be administered to patients with sJIA-MAS with a negative corticosteroid response or contraindications, to optimize their health and safety in the COVID era.

Differences in Cyberchondria, Internet Addiction, Anxiety Sensitivity, Health Anxiety, and Coronavirus Anxiety Among Students: A Web-Based Comparative Survey

Background: Students' health-related anxiety may exacerbate cyberchondria and internet addiction (IA), especially during pandemics such as the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, the associations of students' demographic and academic characteristics with cyberchondria, anxiety, and IA have not yet been examined. Aim: The present study aimed to compare university-level students' scores in cyberchondria, IA, and anxiety (i.e. anxiety sensitivity, health anxiety, and coronavirus anxiety) based on students' characteristics of number of years online, grade point average (GPA), the field of study, year of study, gender, and the availability of Internet access at school. Methods: Data were collected using valid questionnaires from 143 university-level students via a web-based survey. Results: Cyberchondria levels were moderate, IA mild, anxiety sensitivity low, health anxiety typical, and coronavirus anxiety functional. No significant differences in the total scores of the compared variables were noted between the compared groups. However, some individual items differed, as follows: 1) Cyberchondria differed according to the student's GPA and the availability of the Internet access at school and 2) IA differed according to all characteristics;and 3) anxiety sensitivity and health anxiety differed according to students' GPA. Conclusions: The students did not demonstrate high levels of cyberchondria, IA, anxiety sensitivity, or anxiety caused by searching for online health information. Conceptual differences in the concepts can be used in designing interventions to help students prevent and manage such challenges and address avoidance behaviors.

Implementation of LoRa in River Water Quality Monitoring

Emergence of Long Range (LoRa) in network technologies become game changer for Internet of Things (IoT) application. Deployment of LoRa enable IoT application of environment monitoring to cover wide area while maintain at low energy and low cost. Water quality monitoring program was developed to maintain and protect quality of water resources for daily purpose. Also, to prevent pollution and disease epidemic peculiarly during Covid19. This research aimed to build autonomous water quality monitoring prototype implemented with LoRa network for support decision system. The Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSN) that embedded with five type of water quality sensors of pH, turbidity, total dissolved solid (TDS), dissolved oxygen (DO) and temperature linked to single gateway. Water environmentalist able to view the result of timely water quality from mobile application dashboard. Though the performance not severely affected, acquired results revealed non-line of sight condition, transmission power and Spread Factor (SF) value influenced LoRa performance in urban environment. In conclusion, a few improvements on the system grant LoRa high capabilities to be integrated with IoT environment application in urban environment. © The 2022 International Conference on Artificial Life and Robotics (ICAROB2022).

Higher incidence of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in areas with combined sewer systems, heavy precipitation, and high percentages of impervious surfaces.

Combined sewer systems (CSS) are water management systems that collect and transport stormwater and sewer water in the same pipes. During large storm events, stormwater runoff may exceed the capacity of the system and lead to combined sewer overflows (CSOs), where untreated sewer and stormwater are released into the environment. Though current literature reveals inconclusive evidence regarding the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, detection of infectious SARS-CoV-2 in urine and feces of COVID-19 patients led to concerns that areas contaminated by CSOs may be a reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 and may result in illness after the ingestion and/or inhalation of contaminated splashes, droplets, or aerosols. We investigated the association between COVID-19 incidence and CSSs and whether this association differed by precipitation and percent impervious surfaces as a proxy for possible CSOs. We fitted a quasi-Poisson regression model to estimate the change in percentage of incidence rate of COVID-19 cases in counties with a CSS compared to those without, adjusting for potential confounders (i.e., state, population density, date of first documented COVID-19 case, social vulnerability, and percent vaccinated) and including interaction variables between CSS, precipitation, and impervious surfaces. Our findings suggest that heavy precipitation in combination with high percentages of imperviousness is associated with higher incidences of COVID-19 cases in counties with a CSS compared to in counties without (p-value = 2.5e-9). For example, CSS-counties with precipitation of 10 in/month may observe a higher incidence in COVID-19 cases compared to non-CSS counties if their impervious surfaces exceed 33.5% [95%CI: 23.0%, 60.0%]. We theorize that more COVID-19 cases may be seen in counties with a CSS, heavy precipitation, and high percentages of impervious surfaces because of the possible increase in frequency and severity of CSOs. The results suggest links between climate change, urbanization, and COVID-19.

Stay Home and Stay Safe with the Budgeting Tool a One-Stop Finance Tracker

COVID-19 has devastated people's lives across the globe. Declining economy, job losses and market uncertainty have created restlessness in public. These unprecedented times have led to concerns about the future and fear of restricted income. To overcome these strenuous and tough times, individuals and families need to take certain vital steps in order to manage and monitor their budgets judiciously. Though COVID-19 will continue to have its adverse consequences globally, a few smart decisions may help common people maintain healthy and stable finances. So it's essential that we keep a track of the transactions every day. To do so, we’ve proposed a web application with the help of HTML and CSS to make it visually appealing. It is capable of tracking the minute transactions that we make. The main objective of this application is for the user to monitor their expenses. The user can store his income and expenses based on the transaction, date of the income or expense and the category of items. This could be achieved by linking the database (MySql) with the PHP script. We have developed a web based application which is used to manage a users daily expense in a more structured and organized manner. Thus, we can minimize the hand-operated computations which would’ve been involved otherwise and also track expenditure. This application asks the user to provide his income which is further split across various categories in order to calculate his total expenses per day, and these results will be stored for each user separately. We also included a feature to scan and store the images of the bill in the database which could be downloaded at any given point of time. In addition to this, we have integrated a calculator which is an optional feature for the user to do the extra calculations within the website rather than going for an external calculator. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.