Covid-19 pandemic has derailed progress on sustainable development goals, says WHO

The World Health Statistics report detailed an overall shortage of services, in and outside the health system, to prevent and treat non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The report also highlighted the need for stronger data and health information systems, owing to "uneven capacities to collect and use accurate, timely, and comparable health statistics.” Samira Asma, WHO assistant director general, said, "As the world battles the most serious pandemic in 100 years, just a decade away from the SDG [sustainable development goal] deadline, we must act together to strengthen primary healthcare and focus on the most vulnerable among us in order to eliminate the gross inequalities that dictate who lives a long, healthy life and who doesn't.”

Life expectancy and COVID-19 infection: a population-based cross-sectional study

Background and Objective: Life expectancy and the consequences of its impairment may affect quality of life and suicide. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy in residents of Gonabad city. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 300 Gonabad residents (general population) from February 2021 to April 2022 using stratified-random sampling method. Data collection was performed through phone interview. Demographic questionnaire and Schneider's life expectancy scale were used. Data analysis was performed using the SPSS software version 23. Findings: Of the 300 participants (53% female and 47% male), 153 were COVID-19 recovered and 147 did not have the history of COVID-19. The average life expectancy score in COVID-19 recovered participants was significantly lower compared to those without the history of COVID-19 (29.17 +or- 5.96 and 31.94+or-4.34, respectively, p=0.001). Also, there was a significant and positive relationship between mean scores of life expectancy and age, gender, education, economic status, the presence of high-risk individuals at home, history of underlying diseases, and smoking (p<0.05). Conclusion: The results of this study stated that life expectancy score in COVID-19 recovered participants was a lower than that of participants without COVID-19 history. Therefore, the role of other variables, including age, gender, and disease history on life expectancy was more prominent on life expectancy in COVID-19 recovered participants.

Enumerating happiness index during COVID-19 lockdowns using artificial intelligence techniques

Happiness index is an all-inclusive methodology to assess well-being and happiness aspects of human resilience and sustainability. Pandemic like COVID-19 has brought deep level changes to human lifestyle and social behaviours. The world has been reshaped and life has more than likely changed permanently. This has led to calls for mental health, yet there is a dire need to introspect the mental state of health and behavioural changes. Happiness index is calculated based on factors such as GDP, freedom to make choice, health life expectancy and social support. These factors are analysed using datasets from social media with machine learning algorithms to map human response to the pandemic. This research focuses on use of artificial intelligence on the impact of lockdowns due to COVID-19 on the global happiness index.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Financial Condition and Mortality in Polish Regions

The study aimed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial condition and mortality in Polish voivodeships. To achieve this objective, the relationship between the number of deaths before and during the pandemic and the financial condition of the provinces in Poland was studied. The study covered the years 2017–2020, for which a one-way ANOVA was used to verify whether there was a relationship between the level of a province's financial condition and the number of deaths. The results of the study are surprising and show that before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a higher number of deaths in provinces that were better off financially, but the relationship was not statistically significant. In contrast, during the pandemic, a statistically significant strong negative correlation between these values was proven, which, in practice, shows that regions with better financial conditions had a higher number of deaths during COVID-19.

MORTALITY TRENDS IN CROATIA IN THE FIRST TWO DECADES OF THE 21st CENTURY

Negative demographic trends in Croatia (natural decrease, negative net migration and population aging) are increasingly influencing socio-economic development of the country. Already in early 21st century, the long term decrease of live births and the increase of deaths were recognized as destabilizing factors of population development in Croatia. After the Croatian accession to the EU, the concerns regarding future demographic development of the country raised even more due to intensive emigration to other EU countries, which coincided with the historically low birth rates and high death rates. The focus of this paper is on mortality trends in Croatia in the first two decades of the 21st century. In this period, mortality in Croatia was influenced by different socio-economic, demographic, and epidemiological factors. Given the lack of recent papers dealing with mortality in Croatia, the main aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the changes in selected mortality indicators and contribute to the discussion on recent mortality trends in Croatia. The results of this research indicate that Croatia experienced some positive changes regarding mortality (increase of life expectancy at birth and decrease of infant mortality rates in the first period, in particular), but, some of the trends are not favourable, particularly the changes in the causes of death. Although improvements were observed regarding the share of deaths caused by the diseases of the circulatory system, there was a notable increase in deaths caused by the endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases which can be attributed to the unhealthy lifestyle and various behavioural factors.

Becoming immortal: future wellness and medical tourism markets

PurposeIs humanity heading to immortal living? If so, what areas of society are playing an active role in achieving this? In order to understand this, the study explores the relationship between immortality and the wellness and medical tourism industry to seek potential relationships between them and ultimately, asks difficult questions about the growth of these tourism sectors and the potential need for greater regulation of them.Design/methodology/approachTaking a pragmatic philosophical approach and through the examination of refined information from secondary sources and published material and reports, the study presents original theoretical knowledge and a model exploring tourism and human immortality.FindingsThis paper argues that continued growth in the wellness and medical markets today could lead to a world where transhumanists and cyborgs are present in our world, even taking over from Homo sapiens. The study presents a model highlighting the potential role of wellness and medical tourism markets, illustrating the potential for future consumer services that could further fuel the search for immortality. Thus, how such markets and consumer desires are (in)directly supporting humanities desire for (non-human) immortal existence.Originality/valueToday, individuals are driven by wellness practices and medical and cosmetic desires and are willing to travel the globe in search of companies who are either capable of carrying out the desired procedures or seeking prices more affordable to them. This research offers novel insights into these complex relationships and maps the affiliation between wellness and medical practices and the concept of immortality.

Taking Class Seriously

This article critically analyzes the human rights perspective upon what has emerged as one of the most significant socioeconomic and political challenges confronting many millions of people residing within high-income, liberal-democratic societies: rising poverty and socioeconomic inequality. This article argues that international and domestic human rights law and the social and political imaginaries of the wider human rights community largely fail to adequately diagnose and effectively respond to poverty and inequality within high-income, liberal-democratic societies. As a political and ethical doctrine founded upon a normative commitment to social justice, human rights should be taking the lead in efforts to condemn, understand, and develop responses to the poverty and inequality which blight the lives of many millions of people within many of the world's most affluent and, allegedly, most "liberal” societies. Human rights law has historically not done so. We, as a community, have not done so. This article offers a specific explanation for this continuing failure, by focusing upon the absence of any concerted recognition of or engagement with social class as it contributes to and compounds our exposure to poverty and inequality. Human rights remain largely blind to the many ways in which social class is intricately connected to poverty and inequality. The human rights community within high-income, liberal-democratic societies characteristically fails to take class seriously. Building upon previous writing in this area, this article explains why class is rarely recognized or engaged with by the human rights community. This article also sets out the basis for how we might begin the task of overcoming this highly damaging class blindness, to set the stage for what the author asserts as an urgent need if human rights is to provide the kind of political and ethical leadership required to effectively engage with poverty and inequality in affluent societies: the degentrification of human rights.

The Way from the Leading Position to the Last: Geo-demographic Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Czechia

This chapter is devoted to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in time and space in Czechia and in a brief context of its neighboring countries. It is (except for the theoretical background and data description) thematically divided into three parts and uses different approaches in the analysis. The first part descriptively outlines the trajectories of the virus in the Czech population. The second part, based on the demographic approach, examines the potential impact of COVID-19 on mortality. The third part presents a time-space analysis of the spread of COVID-19 at the regional level. Among the fundamental risk factors for Czechia, there is the inexperience of the Czech health and hygiene systems in dealing with more serious infectious epidemics in the past, the absence of a scientific and independent public health institution, and non-conceptual political decisions in the management of pandemics. In the analysis, the interdisciplinary scientific approach is used (medical geography, demography, and spatial analysis) to analyze such a complex phenomenon. It was shown that during the first year of pandemics (March 2020-March 2021) there were four pandemic waves in Czechia. Except for the preventive and anti-pandemic measures, the effect on the mortality level and socioeconomic status in particular regions could be expected. The estimated effect of COVID-19 on the life expectancy at birth was estimated around a 1 year decrease, the same as in other Central European countries. This impact is expected to be much lower in the case of Germany. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

The clinical trial of patients improved from COVID-19: the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on mental health and life expectancy (single-subject study)

Background & Aims: In early January 2020, a new corona virus called corona was identified as an infectious agent by the World Health Organization and caused a viral pneumonia outbreak, the first of which was reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. The virus has so far infected most countries in the world and has become a global problem. By this time in December 2021, about 265 million people in the world have been infected with this virus and 5 million 270 thousand people have died from this disease. According to the World Health Organization, the incidence of this disease is still increasing and will become the third leading cause of death in the world by 2030. This disease has a special complexity and has multiple dimensions and consequences that have caused many problems in the field of health, social and economic as well as psychological for people. The emergence of this disease is now a public health crisis. According to this research, exposure to news and restrictions caused by this disease can lead to many mental health problems. In fact, one of the situations that puts a lot of stress on people during the outbreak of covid 19 disease is the inability to predict and uncertainty about the control and end of the disease. Mental health is defined as a harmonious and harmonious behavior with society, recognizing and accepting social realities, the power to adapt to them and meeting one's balanced needs and is an important factor for the health of society. The prevalence of the disease can also increase feelings of loneliness, decrease social support, feelings of fear and anxiety to clinical stress and anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder associated with the disease, and decreased life expectancy. One of the hopeful factors is health and the disease can cause despair, fear and even despair of the patient. The outbreak of a disease has a much deeper and wider impact and affects not only the affected community and relatives, but the entire community. Because everyone finds themselves at risk, and therefore people's feel of safe and healthy changes, and this situation causes people to despair. Hope is the capacity to imagine the ability to create paths to desirable goals and to imagine the motivation to move in those paths. Hope predicts physical and mental health such as positive response to medical interventions, mental health, effective getting along, and health-promoting behaviors. Covid 19 disease can also lead to psychological problems due to its infectious nature and unpredictable nature. In this regard, various researchers consider the implementation of public health policies, including areas related to individual and collective mental health in accordance with the different stages of the epidemic of this disease is very necessary. Mindfulness can be an effective tool for achieving peace of mind and body that helps people become aware of their current feelings. Mindfulness-based interventions are considered as one of the third generation or third wave cognitive-behavioral therapies. Mindfulness is a form of meditation rooted in Eastern religious teachings and rituals, especially Buddhism. Segal has defined mindfulness as paying attention to specific and purposeful ways, in the present time, without judgment or prejudice. Linhan stressed for the first time the need to pay attention to mindfulness as one of the essential components of psychological therapy. Mindfulness requires the development of three components: judgment avoidance, purposeful awareness, and focus on the present moment. Focusing on the present and processing all aspects of the above experience makes one aware of the daily activities and automatic functioning of the mind in the past and future world and he controls emotions, thoughts, and physical states through moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts. As a result, it is released from the everyday and automatic mind focused on the past and the future. Although general vaccination has reduced the virus in some countries, including Iran, and reduced the number of infected people, a large num

Mapping Life Expectancy Loss in Barcelona in 2020

We use a Bayesian spatio-temporal model, first to smooth small-area initial life expectancy estimates in Barcelona for 2020, and second to predict what small-area life expectancy would have been in 2020 in absence of covid-19 using mortality data from 2007 to 2019. This allows us to estimate and map the small-area life expectancy loss, which can be used to assess how the impact of covid-19 varies spatially, and to explore whether that loss relates to underlying factors, such as population density, educational level, or proportion of older individuals living alone. We find that the small-area life expectancy loss for men and for women have similar distributions, and are spatially uncorrelated but positively correlated with population density and among themselves. On average, we estimate that the life expectancy loss in Barcelona in 2020 was of 2.01 years for men, falling back to 2011 levels, and of 2.11 years for women, falling back to 2006 levels.

Erratum: On the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality: Lost years or lost days?

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.1015501.].

Cause-of-death statistics in 2020 in the Republic of Korea.

Background: This study analyzed the causes of death in the Korean population in 2020. Method(s): Cause-of-death data for 2020 from Statistics Korea were examined based on the Korean Standard Classification of Diseases and Causes of Death, 7th revision and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th revision. Result(s): In total, 304,948 deaths occurred, reflecting an increase of 9,838 (3.3%) from 2019. The crude death rate (the number of deaths per 100,000 people) was 593.9, corresponding to an increase of 19.0 (3.3%) from 2019. The 10 leading causes of death, in descending order, were malignant neoplasms, heart diseases, pneumonia, cerebrovascular diseases, intentional self-harm, diabetes mellitus, Alzheimer disease, liver diseases, hypertensive diseases, and sepsis. Cancer accounted for 27.0% of deaths. Within the category of malignant neoplasms, the top 5 leading organs of involvement were the lung, liver, colon, stomach, and pancreas. Sepsis was included in the 10 leading causes of death for the first time. Mortality due to pneumonia decreased to 43.3 (per 100,000 people) from 45.1 in 2019. The number of deaths due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was 950, of which 54.5% were in people aged 80 or older. Conclusion(s): These changes reflect the continuing increase in deaths due to diseases of old age, including sepsis. The decrease in deaths due to pneumonia may have been due to protective measures against SARS-CoV-2. With the concomitant decrease in fertility, 2020 became the first year in which Korea's natural total population decreased.Copyright © Korean Medical Association.

Research Note: COVID-19 Is Not an Independent Cause of Death.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had overwhelming global impacts with deleterious social, economic, and health consequences. To assess the COVID-19 death toll, researchers have estimated declines in 2020 life expectancy at birth (e0). When data are available only for COVID-19 deaths, but not for deaths from other causes, the risks of dying from COVID-19 are typically assumed to be independent of those from other causes. In this research note, we explore the soundness of this assumption using data from the United States and Brazil, the countries with the largest number of reported COVID-19 deaths. We use three methods: one estimates the difference between 2019 and 2020 life tables and therefore does not require the assumption of independence, and the other two assume independence to simulate scenarios in which COVID-19 mortality is added to 2019 death rates or is eliminated from 2020 rates. Our results reveal that COVID-19 is not independent of other causes of death. The assumption of independence can lead to either an overestimate (Brazil) or an underestimate (United States) of the decline in e0, depending on how the number of other reported causes of death changed in 2020.

Niche diversity effects on personality measurement - evidence from large national samples during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We report systematic variability in the psychometric properties of a brief personality inventory during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon recent discussions about the universality vs cultural relativism of personality measures, we review and comparatively test theories predicting systematic variability in personality measurement across cultures using an established brief personality measure applied to population samples in 16 nations during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 35,052). We found systematic variation in factor replicability and effective dimensionality. In line with previous theorizing, factors replicated better in contexts with greater niche diversity. Examining possible drivers underlying this association, the investigation of the individual components in the niche construction index suggested that life expectancy and to a lesser degree economic complexity are associated with greater personality structure differentiation. Population-level indicators of acute threat due to COVID-19 did not show credible effects. These patterns suggest that a) investigation of personality structure in population samples can provide useful insights into personality dynamics, b) socioecological factors have a systematic impact on survey responses, but c) we also need better theorizing and research about both personality and culture to understand how niche construction dynamics operate.

Healthcare in Russia: Macroeconomic Parameters and Structural Issues.

The epidemiological crisis of 2020-2021 has revealed a number of imbalances and "bottlenecks" that have developed in the Russian healthcare system over the past 20 years as a result of a policy of limiting development to breakthroughs in individual areas accompanied by optimization of the sector. It became evident that one of the most acute problems is interregional disparity in terms of personnel and resource availability in the healthcare system, which determines the system's ability to respond to challenges and shocks. Solving these problems requires a comprehensive approach: simply increasing the sector's financing is not sufficient and must be accompanied by structural changes, in particular, modifying the education system and training new highly qualified personnel, creating an effective system of territorial distribution of personnel, and radically increasing the availability of high-end equipment, i.e., a transition to a new model of healthcare.

Determinants of life expectancy at birth: a longitudinal study on OECD countries.

This paper analyses the influence of several determinants on life expectancy at birth in 36 OECD countries over the 1999-2018 period. We utilized a cross-country fixed-effects multiple regression analysis with year and country dummies and used dynamic models, backward stepwise selection, and Arellano-Bond estimators to treat potential endogeneity issues. The results show the influence of per capita health-care expenditure, incidence of out-of-pocket expenditure, physician density, hospital bed density, social spending, GDP level, participation ratio to labour, prevalence of chronic respiratory diseases, temperature, and total size of the population on life expectancy at birth. In line with previous studies, this analysis confirms the relevance of both health care expenditure and health care system (physicians and hospital beds in our analysis) in influencing a country's population life expectancy. It also outlines the importance of other factors related to population behaviour and social spending jointly considered on this outcome. Policy makers should carefully consider these mutual influences when allocating public funds, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic period.

France 2022: a narrowing gap between births and deaths

Natural increase-the difference between births and deaths-fell fourfold in France between 2012 and 2022, reflecting a 100,000 decrease in the number of births over the last 10 years and a similar increase in the number of deaths. Life expectancy has stagnated over the last 3 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic combined with excess mortality in 2022 linked to several summer heatwaves and a seasonal flu epidemic at the end of the year. It appears that while COVID-19 had little impact on births, it temporarily modified their seasonality.