The transition of humanity from a predominantly cohesive energy system to one of predominantly negative energy. And then what?

To answer the question, and then what? It is first necessary to ask ourselves how we appeared on Earth and how we got to where we are;then to answer what happens today;and, finally, to try to establish how our disturbed human system might unfold in the future. Development and preparation of this document use a complex systems perspective. The link between human system components is considered as a social energy that can unite or repel. The greater the cohesion energy, the greater the adaptive capacity of the system;its continuity implies transformation. Entropic energy leads to collapse. The human system's historical deployment has generated changes in the predominance of cohesion and repulsion energies that have manifested themselves in the pattern of bonds., Entropic energy has been enhanced with the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic. The same goes for the growth of mental disorders and the use of fossil energy. To mitigate its negative impact, it is necessary to change the components' role and their behavior logic. © 2022, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. All rights reserved.

The Risks and Harms Associated with Modern Slavery during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United Kingdom: A Multi-Method Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably affected global economies and societies, exacerbating existing social inequalities. This "syndemic” pandemic has placed people and communities affected by modern slavery and human trafficking at elevated risk of multiple harms. This paper uses a mix of methods–an evidence synthesis, a survivor survey, web-monitoring, and dialogue events–to explore how COVID-19 has affected the risks and pathways to harm associated with modern slavery/human trafficking in the UK and U.S. We use concepts of hazard, risk, exposure, and harm and the tools of public health risk and resilience assessment to examine how COVID-19 has amplified existing risks of harm and generated new pathways to further harm. We also use a novel complex systems approach to represent risk relationships and demonstrate how the economic shock of COVID-19 and mandated social isolation have led to negative outcomes for affected people. The paper provides policy and practice insight into interventions can be implemented across systems to minimize exploitation and how locally led intervention can offset the damaging effects of the pandemic (SDGs 5 & 16). © 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Towards a sustainable integrated management approach to uncertainty surrounding COVID-19

Traditional approaches to system management are not suited to highly uncertain conditions. Hard system approaches with a top-down management approach are often used to manage well-defined systems that are not easily able to cope with uncertainty. Soft system approaches of the with bottom-up or participative style may cause a lack of conformance to industry standards. Few studies have investigated these approaches within the context of COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this paper aims to use the philosophy of Total Systems Intervention to investigate the applicability of an integrated management approach to cope with the uncertainty of COVID-19. Three different countries from Europe, Oceania and Asia are selected as typical case studies to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of differing management approaches. The case studies demonstrate that using an integrated management approach can potentially assist decision-makers to deal with crises and conclusively reveal the superiority of the integrated approach, independent of cultural milieu. © 2023 The Authors. Systems Research and Behavioral Science published by International Federation for Systems Research and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The Pandemic Holiday Blip in New York City.

When it comes to pandemics, such as the one caused by the Coronavirus disease COVID-19, various issues and problems have arisen for the healthcare infrastructure and institutions. With increasing number of patients in need of urgent medical care and hospitalizations, the healthcare systems and regional hospitals may approach their maximum service capacity and may face shortage of various parameters, such as supplies including PPE, medications, therapeutic devices, ventilators, beds, and many more. The article at hand describes the development and framework of a simulation model that enables the modeling and evaluation of the COVID-19 pandemic progress. To achieve this, the model dynamically mimics and simulates the developments and time-dependent behavior of various crucial parameters of the pandemic, among others, the daily infection numbers and death rate. In addition, the model enables the simulation of single events and scenarios that occur outside of the regular pandemic developments as anomalies, such as holidays. Unlike traditional models, the proposed framework is based on factors and parameters closely derived from reality, such as the contact rate of individuals, which allows for a much more realistic representation. In addition, the real connection enables the assessment of effects of various influences regarding the development and progress of the pandemic, such as hospitalization numbers over time. All the aforementioned points are possible within the simulation framework and do not require awaiting the unfolding of the effects in reality. Thus, the model is capable of dynamically predicting how different scenarios turn out. The abilities of the model are demonstrated, illustrated, and proven in a specific case study that shows the impact of holidays, such as Passover and Easter in New York City when quarantine measures might have been ignored, and an increase in extended family gatherings temporarily occurred. As a result, the simulation showed significant impacts and disproportionate number of patients in need of medical care that could be potentially detrimental in reality. For example, compared to the previous trajectory of the pandemic, for a temporary increase of 50% in the contact rate of individuals, the model showed that the total number of cases would increase by 461 090, the maximum number of required hospitalizations would rise to 79 733, and the total number of fatalities would climb by 19 125 over 90 days. In addition to its function and proven capabilities, the model can and is furthermore planned to be adapted to other areas, not necessarily only metropolitan regions in order to expand the utilization of its predictive power. Such predictions could be used to derive regulatory measures and to test various policies for COVID-19 containment.

Fine-Grained Prediction and Control of Covid-19 Pandemic in a City: Application to Post-Initial Stages

Predicting the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic during its early phases was relatively easy as its dynamics were governed by few influencing factors that included a single dominant virus variant and the demographic characteristics of a given area. Several models based on a wide variety of techniques were developed for this purpose. Their prediction accuracy started deteriorating as the number of influencing factors and their interrelationships grew over time. With the pandemic evolving in a highly heterogeneous way across individual countries, states, and even individual cities, there emerged a need for a contextual and fine-grained understanding of the pandemic to come up with effective means of pandemic control. This paper presents a fine-grained model for predicting and controlling Covid-19 in a large city. Our approach borrows ideas from complex adaptive system-of-systems paradigm and adopts a concept of agent as the core modeling ion. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Research on the Sustainable Development and Dynamic Capabilities of China's Aircraft Leasing Industry Based on System Dynamics Theory

The Boeing 737 MAX crisis and COVID-19 pandemic have seriously influenced the development of China's aircraft leasing industry in the past two years. This paper applies system dynamics theory to explore the sustainable development of China's aircraft leasing industry. It analyses the dynamic mechanism and constructs a system dynamics model. Based on China's macroeconomic data and historical data from the financial, aviation, and leasing industries, it aims to stimulate the development of China's aircraft leasing industry in the next five years. Through sensitivity analysis, this research finds that changes in GDP growth have the most obvious impact on the sustainable development of China's aircraft leasing industry. Reducing the average financing cost and the income tax rate of aircraft leasing companies, increasing their investment in talent, and controlling risk will increase the market share of China's aircraft leasing companies and promote the development of the industry. However, increasing the number of aircraft leasing companies has little effect on market share. On this basis, this paper proposes policy recommendations to promote the sustainable development of China's aircraft leasing industry.

Lessons from COVID-19 for managing transboundary climate risks and building resilience.

COVID-19 has revealed how challenging it is to manage global, systemic and compounding crises. Like COVID-19, climate change impacts, and maladaptive responses to them, have potential to disrupt societies at multiple scales via networks of trade, finance, mobility and communication, and to impact hardest on the most vulnerable. However, these complex systems can also facilitate resilience if managed effectively. This review aims to distil lessons related to the transboundary management of systemic risks from the COVID-19 experience, to inform climate change policy and resilience building. Evidence from diverse fields is synthesised to illustrate the nature of systemic risks and our evolving understanding of resilience. We describe research methods that aim to capture systemic complexity to inform better management practices and increase resilience to crises. Finally, we recommend specific, practical actions for improving transboundary climate risk management and resilience building. These include mapping the direct, cross-border and cross-sectoral impacts of potential climate extremes, adopting adaptive risk management strategies that embrace heterogenous decision-making and uncertainty, and taking a broader approach to resilience which elevates human wellbeing, including societal and ecological resilience.

Intelligent algorithms and complex system for a smart parking for vaccine delivery center of COVID-19.

Achieving community immunity against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) depends on vaccinating the largest number of people within a specific period while taking all precautionary measures. To address this problem, this paper presents a smart parking system that will help the health crisis management committee to vaccinate the largest number of people with the minimum period of time while ensuring that all precautionary measures are followed, through a set of algorithms. These algorithms seek to ensure a uniform distribution of persons in parking. This paper proposes a novel complex system for smart parking and nine algorithms to address the NP-hard problem. The experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of gap and time. Applying these algorithms to smart cities to ensure precautionary measures against COVID-19 can help fight against this pandemic.

Dissecting the common and compartment-specific features of COVID-19 severity in the lung and periphery with single-cell resolution.

Severe COVID-19 is accompanied by rampant immune dysregulation in the lung and periphery, with immune cells of both compartments contributing to systemic distress. The extent to which immune cells of the lung and blood enter similar or distinct pathological states during severe disease remains unknown. Here, we leveraged 96 publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing datasets to elucidate common and compartment-specific features of severe to critical COVID-19 at the levels of transcript expression, biological pathways, and ligand-receptor signaling networks. Comparing severe patients to milder and healthy donors, we identified distinct differential gene expression signatures between compartments and a core set of co-directionally regulated surface markers. A majority of severity-enriched pathways were shared, whereas TNF and interferon responses were polarized. Severity-specific ligand-receptor networks appeared to be differentially active in both compartments. Overall, our results describe a nuanced response during severe COVID-19 where compartment plays a role in dictating the pathological state of immune cells.

Sláintecare implementation status in 2020: Limited progress with entitlement expansion.

The Sláintecare report developed by political consensus sets out a ten year plan for achieving Universal Health Care (UHC) in Ireland. This paper evaluates the design and progress of the report to mid 2020, but with some reflection on the new COVID 19 era, particularly as it relates to the expansion of entitlements to achieve UHC. The authors explore how close Sláintecare is to the UHC ideal. They also review the phased strategy of implementation in Sláintecare that utilises a systems-thinking approach with interlinkages between entitlements, funding, capacity and implementation. Finally the authors review the Sláintecare milestones against the reality of implementation since the publication of the report in 2017, cognisant of government policy and practice. Some of the initial assumptions around the context of Sláintecare were not realised and there has been limited progress made toward expanding entitlements, and certainly short of the original plan. Nevertheless there have been positive developments in that there is evidence that Government's Implementation Strategy and Action Plans are focussing on reforming a complex adaptive system rather than implementing a blueprint with such initiatives as integrated care pilots and citizen engagement. The authors find that this may help the system change but it risks losing some of the essential elements of entitlement expansion in favour of organisational change.