Trust in Government and COVID-19 Response Policy: A Comparative Approach

As nations work to respond to COVID-19, trust in government is critical to achieving health outcomes. Studies argue that greater trust in government is associated with increased compliance with COVID-19 public health policies. This analysis investigated predictors of public trust during COVID-19 in 16 countries grouped in four regions. The data used (n = 47,000) are taken from the Worldwide COVID-19 Attitudes and Beliefs dataset. Five hypotheses test the effects of stringency, geographic location, age, gender, income, and education levels on public trust. Findings reveal that increased stringency measures and education levels are positively associated with trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis is the property of Routledge 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 abstract 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 abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

E-learning Quality Assurance Guidelines for Higher Education Institutions in Jordan

The Covid-19 pandemic affected many areas around the world, and with the lack of a vaccine, social distancing and keeping a high level of hygiene was the only actions people can rely on. Because of this change in the way of life, education was affected where it became not normal for students to socialize and have direct contact with teachers. Taking the case of higher education in Jordan, and its conversion into an online based learning approach, this paper examines an assessment of the quality of education that was taking place during the lock down. Then, it presents a literature study of guidelines published about quality of e-learning, and after evaluating the literature and the specific needs of Jordanian institutes, the paper presents a set of guidelines as a scorecard for higher education-al institutes to follow and maintain a high level of education quality in their online teaching approach. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.

The Role of e-Leadership on the Productivity of Virtual Work in Higher Education

COVID-19 pandemic may further decline productivity of the workforce in the future especially in higher education. This article aims to verify the significance of e-leadership as organizational factor, digital collaboration as job factor, and digital mastery as personal factor on the productivity of virtual work in higher education. Online survey and causal analysis were conducted for supporting this article. It's about 847 academic and non-academic staffs who were participating as the respondents. PLS based Structural Equation Modelling were utilized for structuring and calculating the collected data. The result of statistical analysis reveals that e-leadership affects positively and significantly but indirectly on the productivity of virtual work. Digital mastery and digital collaboration play moderating role in determining effect of e-leadership on work productivity. For maintaining and leveraging the productivity of employee in doing virtual work, the organization should direct leadership of academic managers as transformational leadership approach for developing digital mastery and encouraging digital collaboration. © 2021 IEEE.

Analysis of Teachers' Satisfaction With Online Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic

After one and a half years of forced E-Learning in Jordan due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Higher Education approved a new regulation titled 'Blending E-Learning in Higher Education Institutes (HEI)', which comes hand in hand with an action plan, aiming to transform certain percentages of academic programs (AP) offered in HEI into online and blended learning. This study investigates the attitude of 174 staff members at University of Petra towards the newly stated regulation, and their readiness level to implement the action plan. It also investigates the satisfaction rate of the academic staff with the experience of e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic in Jordan from March 2020-till Au-gust 2021. The study was conducted with a questionnaire distributed electronically. The results show that improvements need to be done on three areas: teachers' training on techniques to create and manage e-content, online assessment methods, and increasing the interactions of students in online courses. It also shows that staff members are satisfied with the new regulations to have percentages of courses fully online while others are blended courses;however, there is dissatisfaction with the pass\fail regulation set by the ministry during the pandemic period. © 2022 IEEE.

Calculating incidence of Influenza-like and COVID-like symptoms from Flutracking participatory survey data.

This article describes a new method for estimating weekly incidence (new onset) of symptoms consistent with Influenza and COVID-19, using data from the Flutracking survey. The method mitigates some of the known self-selection and symptom-reporting biases present in existing approaches to this type of participatory longitudinal survey data. The key novel steps in the analysis are: 1) Identifying new onset of symptoms for three different Symptom Groupings: COVID-like illness (CLI1+, CLI2+), and Influenza-like illness (ILI), for responses reported in the Flutracking survey. 2) Adjusting for symptom reporting bias by restricting the analysis to a sub-set of responses from those participants who have consistently responded for a number of weeks prior to the analysis week. 3) Weighting responses by age to adjust for self-selection bias in order to account for the under- and over-representation of different age groups amongst the survey participants. This uses the survey package [22] in R [30]. 4) Constructing 95% point-wise confidence bands for incidence estimates using weighted logistic regression from the survey package [21] in R [28]. In addition to describing these steps, the article demonstrates an application of this method to Flutracking data for the 12 months from 27th April 2020 until 25th April 2021.

Pulse oximeters market analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic: Kyiv pharmacies' offers and survey of pharmacy faculty students

Objectives The objective of this study was to study the market of pulse oximeters to select the optimal choice for monitoring health status during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Pulse oximeter data, presented on the Tabletki.ua website (2021) in Kyiv (Ukraine), were summarized and discussed. A survey about the history of the device purchase among 170 students of the Faculty of Pharmacy (Zaporizhzhia State Medical University, Ukraine) was statistically analysed by Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Shapiro-Wilk, Levene's, Scheffe tests, one-sample t-test, Spearman's correlation and one-way ANOVA. Key findings The largest part of the Kyiv (Ukraine) pulse oximeter market is occupied by the People's Republic of China (70.97%). The price ranged from UAH 171.50 to UAH 1799.00. The models S6 and Linke LK88 are found to be the best choices according to the fullest provided data, the lowest minimum price and emphasis on the oxygen saturation and pulse rate accuracies. Medical students statistically significant would buy a pulse oximeter for less than UAH 563.40 (t(76) = -2.884;P = 0.005). The price did not depend on age (F = 1.104, P = 0.372) or gender (F = 2.466, P = 0.121), but there was a correlation between price and year of purchase (F = 2.712, P = 0.051). Students are primarily interested in country of origin, guarantees and pharmacist recommendations. A significantly weak Spearman's correlation was found between price and friend advice (rho = 0.275, Sig. = 0.015). Conclusions The same models differ in price by up to 4.2 times and in between them - up to 10. Less than half of the responders bought devices, and even a quarter of them did not use them at all, although they were from a health field. The detailed notifications about accuracy for different patient skin types are required in the device description. More people should be aware of pulse oximeter importance to maintaining health after COVID-19.

An Exploratory Investigation of Comparisons of Student Evaluations of Learning Pre and Post COVID-19 at Private and Public Universities

Although universities attempted to provide as little disruption to student learning as possible, problems arose with their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The current literature is rich with studies reporting experiences with the transition to the virtual learning of the pandemic era. In pursuit of the most effective learning and instructional modes to transition to in times of crisis, university administrators and faculty members need to know more regarding what worked and did not work in the initial response to the COVID-19 crisis. Questions remain. Given the pre-COVID-19 dominance of face-to-face instruction did student opinion of online learning change based on their experiences with the mandated transitions to virtual learning? Are the perceptions different for students at private versus public and small versus large institutions? This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of these bifurcations based on an online survey of student opinion conducted in Spring 2021. The findings provide some insight to student perceptions of the efficacy of the changed learning environment experienced by the subject populations. © 2022, North American Business Press. All rights reserved.

Wellness in COVID'19 Analysis Amidst Student Community in the Pandemic Time

This paper reports the results of students' survey analysis of all the branches of Engineering students' regarding their wellness with respect to their mindset, diet, and the students' mental stability during this the lock down period. At the advent of COVID'19, the respondents exercised the usage of smart devices in a more effective manner and at fewer times got frustrated staying at home for long hours and leading a monotonous life. The survey inquired about accessibility of network issues faced during the pandemic and most of the respondents were trying to keep themselves busy by getting involved in various activities like helping their parents in household, by participating in online courses, webinars, reading books, watching documentaries and other entertainment programmes. The survey has also drawn attention towards the student future concerns and aspirations. © 2021 IEEE.

Household Coping Strategies During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile.

Chile was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The implementation of social distancing measures strongly affected the Chilean economy: the unemployment rate grew rapidly as well as the proportion of population temporarily excluded from the labour force. This article analyses the strategies deployed by Chilean households to cope with the impact of the pandemic at the intersection with household structure and its socio-economics characteristics. Secondary data analysis from the Encuesta Social COVID-19 (COVID-19 Social Survey), carried out by the Chilean Ministry for Social Development and Families, were used to analyse the income-generating and expenditure-minimising strategies adopted by households during the early months (March to July of 2020) of the pandemic. The results show that 60.3% of households experienced a drop in family income, 70.3% indicated that they had to use at least one income-generating strategy, and 76.6% at least one expenditure-minimising strategy during the early months of the pandemic. Indebtedness and decapitalisation characterised most of the coping strategies adopted by households. While living in multigenerational households does not protect family members from declining economic well-being, older people living in one- and two-generation households were found to be least affected economically during the crisis. They were also less likely to resort to these coping strategies, insofar as their income was mainly secured from pensions. Although female-headed households did not show a greater reduction in income than male-headed households, they were more likely to adopt income-generating strategies. This article draws attention to the possible effects of decapitalisation and indebtedness on the long-term economic well-being of households with different structures, and the resulting inequalities in their capacity to recover from the effects of the pandemic. The findings suggest that having a source of family income that is not dependent on labour market flows is crucial in times of crises.

How Covid-19 financially hit urban refugees: evidence from mixed-method research with citizens and Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Peering through a lens of disasters and inequalities, this article measures the financial impacts of Covid-19 on citizens and refugee communities in Turkey during a relatively early phase of the global pandemic. Our data comes from an online survey (N = 1749) conducted simultaneously with Turkish citizens and Syrian refugees living in Turkey, followed by in-depth online interviews with Syrian refugees. Our findings indicate that the initial Covid-19 measures had a higher financial impact on Syrians than on citizens when controlled for employment, wealth, and education, among other variables. In line with the literature, our research confirms that disasters' socio-economic effects disproportionally burden minority communities. We additionally discuss how Covid-19 measures have significantly accelerated effects on refugees compared to the local population, mainly due to the structural and policy context within which forcibly displaced Syrians have been received in Turkey.