Did Covid-19 modify the spatial concentration of business failure?

The existing literature has examined the impact of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic on business failure, highlighting firms' internal characteristics. However, information on changes in firms' external environments remains scarce. This study examines whether Covid-19 has also influenced the spatial co-locational patterns of business failure processes. Therefore, the authors apply symbolisation techniques to identify different business failure processes during pre-and post-covid periods. In addition, the authors compute the Q(m) spatial dependence test for categorical variables to identify differences in the co-location patterns before and after covid. The studie find significant differences in the spatial association of business failure processes, which are further understood when the authors examine sectoral differences.

Investigating Novel Proximity Monitoring Techniques Using Ubiquitous Sensor Technology

The goal of this work is to investigate novel proximity detection techniques by researching and testing various sensor technologies and investigate their feasibility in an athletic context. COVID-19 has challenged sports teams to come up with reasonable and easy-to-implement solutions to provide a safe training environment for their players and staff. For this reason, proximity data is more important than ever, as many teams are in need of a way to measure social distancing and maintain contact tracing of their athletes. Bluetooth has been widely used to detect colocation and monitor social distancing. However, there are many other sensing technologies that may prove to be more accurate, robust, and secure. Therefore, the focus of this work is to investigate how Bluetooth compares with ultra-wideband and ultrasound technologies when monitoring the distance between users. We have implemented and compared the three modalities in a controlled experiment to investigate their accuracy at detecting distance between users at various levels. Our results indicate that the UWB signals are the most accurate at monitoring co-location. This is in-line with previous research suggesting that Bluetooth cannot accurately measure the distance between fast moving objects and needs about 20 seconds to stabilize distance measurements;therefore, it is not feasible to use for sports. In addition, we recorded that UWB models yielded an accuracy of over 95%, while ultrasound correctly classified the observations over 80% of the time, and Bluetooth had an accuracy of less than 50% when predicting if a given signal is within 6 feet or not.

Co-location with marketing value activities as manufacturing upgrading in a COVID-19 outbreak era.

Co-location has been a relevant topic in the international business literature, yet the extant literature focuses on the co-location of research and development (R&D) and production activities and overlooks marketing value activities. Marketing innovation is an agile and effective way to respond to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and many manufacturers in global value chains aim to upgrade functionally following the trajectory of the OEM-ODM-OBM. Thus, this study proposes the co-location of marketing activities as a flexible and organizational learning strategy for manufacturing upgrades, and explores the antecedents of marketing co-location in foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions. The proposed research framework was examined using survey data from 343 Taiwanese manufacturing firms in China, which were drawn from a database compiled by Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2020. The results show that the breadth of international experience, linkage to R&D, marketing as a primary knowledge source in the host country, upgrading for local demands, and new product development for global supply are all positively associated with the co-location of marketing and production functions. Additionally, it was found that there was a negative association between FDIs that had been impacted by COVID-19 and marketing co-location. The findings provide valuable theoretical, practical, and strategic insights into how firms should manage their global value chains with respect to marketing co-location in case of another crisis.

Effects of population co-location reduction on cross-county transmission risk of COVID-19 in the United States.

The objective of this study is to examine the transmission risk of COVID-19 based on cross-county population co-location data from Facebook. The rapid spread of COVID-19 in the United States has imposed a major threat to public health, the real economy, and human well-being. With the absence of effective vaccines, the preventive actions of social distancing, travel reduction and stay-at-home orders are recognized as essential non-pharmacologic approaches to control the infection and spatial spread of COVID-19. Prior studies demonstrated that human movement and mobility drove the spatiotemporal distribution of COVID-19 in China. Little is known, however, about the patterns and effects of co-location reduction on cross-county transmission risk of COVID-19. This study utilizes Facebook co-location data for all counties in the United States from March to early May 2020 for conducting spatial network analysis where nodes represent counties and edge weights are associated with the co-location probability of populations of the counties. The analysis examines the synchronicity and time lag between travel reduction and pandemic growth trajectory to evaluate the efficacy of social distancing in ceasing the population co-location probabilities, and subsequently the growth in weekly new cases across counties. The results show that the mitigation effects of co-location reduction appear in the growth of weekly new confirmed cases with one week of delay. The analysis categorizes counties based on the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and examines co-location patterns within and across groups. Significant segregation is found among different county groups. The results suggest that within-group co-location probabilities (e.g., co-location probabilities among counties with high numbers of cases) remain stable, and social distancing policies primarily resulted in reduced cross-group co-location probabilities (due to travel reduction from counties with large number of cases to counties with low numbers of cases). These findings could have important practical implications for local governments to inform their intervention measures for monitoring and reducing the spread of COVID-19, as well as for adoption in future pandemics. Public policy, economic forecasting, and epidemic modeling need to account for population co-location patterns in evaluating transmission risk of COVID-19 across counties.

Anesthetic Considerations During Heart Transplantation Using Donation After Circulatory Death.

Worldwide, the majority of heart transplant organs are from donation after brain death. However, the shortage of suitable donors places severe limitations on this route. One option to increase the donor pool is to use organs from donation after circulatory death (DCD). Transplant centers for solid organs have been using DCD organs for years. At this time, 40% of solid organ transplantation in the United Kingdom uses organs from DCD. Use of DCD for solid organ transplants in Canada is also rising. Recently, there has been interest in using DCD organs for heart transplantation. The authors will discuss their experience of 4 heart transplants with organs from DCD donors after normothermic regional perfusion (NRP). The authors' first heart transplant using a DCD organ was in January 2020, and the fourth was in March 2020, just before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The authors' protocol using NRP allows adequate evaluation of the donor heart to confidently determine organ acceptance. The co-location of the donor and the recipient in neighboring operating rooms limits ischemic times. Avoidance of an expensive ex vivo organ perfusion machine is an additional benefit for programs that may not have the resources required to purchase and maintain the machine. Some hospitals may not have the resources and space to be able to co-locate both the donor and recipient. Use of cold storage may be an option to transport the procured organ, similar to donation after brain death organs. The authors hope that this technique of NRP in DCD donors can help further increase the donor pool for heart transplantation in the United States.