PREDICTING PILGRIM AND VISITOR SATISFACTION THROUGH USING SMARTPHONE APPLICATIONS AT HOLY SITES DURING COVID-19

This study aims to investigate the promotion of digital transformation in Umrah and Visitation through the management of smartphone applications (such as Tawakkalna and Nusuk) in light of COVID-19. The research measures the impact of digital transformation on visits during COVID-19, in light of the Kingdom's Vision 2030 statement, in terms of pilgrims' and visitors' satisfaction with the services provided in Madinah. The study relied on the descriptive analytical approach to collect and analyse primary and secondary data as the basis for research findings. An electronic questionnaire was designed and distributed to pilgrims and visitors in Madinah. The study found a positive significant impact of digital transformation on visits during COVID-19 in light of the Kingdom's Vision 2030 statement and pilgrims' and visitors' satisfaction with the services provided to them. The study recommends that decisionmakers and employers emphasize the need to use Smartphone applications in Hajj and Umrah visits even after the end of the Corona crisis. Applications were found to be critically important in limiting the spread of the virus. There is a need for continuous improvements in digital transformation in Hajj, Umrah and visits. © Author(s) 2022.

The relationship between hand hygiene and rates of acute respiratory infections among Umrah pilgrims: A pilot randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: There is a lack of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) investigating the role of hand hygiene in preventing and containing acute respiratory infections (ARIs) in mass gatherings. In this pilot RCT, we assessed the feasibility of establishing a large-scale trial to explore the relationship between practising hand hygiene and rates of ARI in Umrah pilgrimage amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: A parallel RCT was conducted in hotels in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, between April and July 2021. Domestic adult pilgrims who consented to participate were randomised 1:1 to the intervention group who received alcohol-based hand rub (ABHR) and instructions, or to the control group who did not receive ABHR or instructions but were free to use their own supplies. Pilgrims in both groups were then followed up for seven days for ARI symptoms. The primary outcome was the difference in the proportions of syndromic ARIs among pilgrims between the randomised groups. RESULTS: A total of 507 (control: intervention = 267: 240) participants aged between 18 and 75 (median 34) years were randomised; 61 participants were lost to follow-up or withdrew leaving 446 participants (control: intervention = 237:209) for the primary outcome analysis; of whom 10 (2.2 %) had developed at least one respiratory symptom, three (0.7 %) had 'possible ILI' and two (0.4 %) had 'possible COVID-19'. The analysis of the primary outcome found no evidence of difference in the proportions of ARIs between the randomised groups (odds ratio 1.1 [0.3-4.0] for intervention relative to control). CONCLUSION: This pilot trial suggests that conducting a future definitive RCT to assess the role of hand hygiene in the prevention of ARIs is feasible in Umrah setting amidst such a pandemic; however, outcomes from this trial are inconclusive, and such a study would need to be very large given the low rates of outcomes observed here. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This trial was registered in the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) (ACTRN12622001287729), the full protocol can be accessed there.

USAGE AND USABILITY OF HEALTH MOBILE APPLICATIONS DURING COVID-19 IN SAUDI ARABIA-A CASE OF TAWAKKALNA AND SEHATY APPLICATION

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the usability and usage statistics of the Tawakkalna and Sehaty programs. The study employed a cross-sectional methodology to collect statistics on usability and utilization. A random sample was used to collect data, and an online survey was given to the research population. A Likert scale with a range of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) was utilized. The results indicated that 147 individuals participated in the survey. More than half were female (85.1%), and more than half were citizens (66%). Tawakkalna was installed on the mobile devices of 97.9% of the population, while 89.4% had Sehaty installed. 38.3% utilize Tawakkalna twice daily, 34.0% utilize it once daily, whereas 61.7% utilize the Sehaty application monthly. The acceptance of Tawakkalna's usability and the interface is 61.7%, while Sehaty's is 57.0%. Information on Tawakkalna is helpful, updated, and accurate to 55.3%, 66%, and 61.7%, respectively. 36.2% of respondents indicated that it is tough to recover from any error, while 34% indicated that it is simple to recover in Tawakalna. 87.2% of the population utilized Tawakkalna's health services. In the instance of Sehaty, the usefulness, frequency of notification updates, rate of recovery, and accuracy of information are 40.4%, 38.3%, 38.3%, and 48.9%, respectively. Tawakkalna was developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while 89.4% of the population has been vaccinated with Sehaty. It serves multiple purposes, including health, educational, and tourism application aspects. Before the pandemic, a Sehaty application was utilized to give immunizations. The Mean and Standard Deviation indicate that, except for its usefulness, the Tawakkalna has superior experience in all respects. People use Sehaty to schedule covid-19 immunization sessions © 2022, International Journal of eBusiness and eGovernment Studies.All Rights Reserved.

Deep Learning Based Face Mask Detection in Religious Mass Gathering During COVID-19 Pandemic

Notwithstanding the religious intention of billions of devotees, the religious mass gathering increased major public health concerns since it likely became a huge super spreading event for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Most attendees ignored preventive measures, namely maintaining physical distance, practising hand hygiene, and wearing facemasks. Wearing a face mask in public areas protects people from spreading COVID-19. Artificial intelligence (AI) based on deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) could assist in fighting covid-19 in several ways. This study introduces a new deep learning-based Face Mask Detection in Religious Mass Gathering (DLFMD-RMG) technique during the COVID-19 pandemic. The DLFMD-RMG technique focuses mainly on detecting face masks in a religious mass gathering. To accomplish this, the presented DLFMD-RMG technique undergoes two pre-processing levels: Bilateral Filtering (BF) and Contrast Enhancement. For face detection, the DLFMD-RMG technique uses YOLOv5 with a ResNet-50 detector. In addition, the face detection performance can be improved by the seeker optimization algorithm (SOA) for tuning the hyperparameter of the ResNet-50 module, showing the novelty of the work. At last, the faces with and without masks are classified using the Fuzzy Neural Network (FNN) model. The stimulation study of the DLFMD-RMG algorithm is examined on a benchmark dataset. The results highlighted the remarkable performance of the DLFMD-RMG model algorithm in other recent approaches. © 2023 CRL Publishing. All rights reserved.

Non-Immersive Virtual Reality Umrah Simulation: A Functionality Test

Umrah is an Islamic pilgrimage that Muslims can perform at any time. Umrah will take place at the holy place, Mecca. Usually, before performing the umrah, the pilgrims will attend umrah courses to learn how to practice step-by-step procedures. However, the Covid-19 outbreak stopped the pilgrims from attending the live umrah course. This scenario causes difficulty for pilgrims to visualize the umrah practice. Therefore, we have developed a Non-Immersive Virtual Reality Umrah Simulation (NIVRUS) to help the pilgrimage visualize the umrah practice. This study has implemented a Waterfall Model as a development methodology in which phases are divided into sequential phases. Each phase must be completed before proceeding to the next phase. In this present study, the focus is on evaluating NIVRUS through a functionality test. The findings indicate that all the functions in NIVRUS properly function as expected. © 2022 IEEE.

Incidence, risk factors, and whole-genome sequence of SARs-CoV-2 and influenza virus among the Egyptian pilgrims returning from Umrah mass gathering in Saudi Arabia, April-May 2022.

BACKGROUND: Ramadan Umrah is the second largest Islamic pilgrimage with 2.75 million pilgrims allowed in 2022. This report presents the results of a survey among Egyptian pilgrims returning from Ramadan Umrah to monitor SARS-CoV-2 and influenza activity and identify prevalent SARS-CoV-2 variants after this mass gathering. METHODS: Cross-sectional survey conducted at Cairo airport from 30th April 2022-5 th May 2022. Pilgrims were invited to participate voluntarily. After consenting, participants interviewed using questionnaire including demographics, health status, and vaccination information and asked to provide NP/OP swabs for SARS-CoV-2 and influenza testing by RT-PCR. Whole-genome sequencing performed for 29 SARS-CoV-2 isolates. Incidence calculated, descriptive data analysis performed, and SARS-CoV-2 patients were compared to negatively tested participants using chi2 and p value< 0.05. RESULTS: Overall, 1003 subjects participated, their mean age 50.9 ± 13 years, 594 (59.2%) were males. Of them, 76(7.6%) tested positive including 67(6.7%) SARS-CoV-2, 7(0.7%) influenza and 2(0.2%) SARS-CoV-2/influenza coinfection. Omicron sublineage BA.2 was the prevalent variant with no difference in severity identified between BA.1 and BA.2. No difference was identified between COVID-19 incidence among receivers of different vaccine types or between fully vaccinated and booster dose receivers. CONCLUSIONS: Survey indicated a low incidence of SARs-CoV-2 and influenza among Egyptian pilgrims returning from Ramadan Umrah. Patients had mild or no symptoms with no hospitalization or deaths reported. Full vaccination and booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines proved equally effective. Enhancing COVID-19 and influenza vaccination before mass gatherings and close monitoring of respiratory viruses among pilgrims returning from Hajj and Umrah are crucial for outbreak early detection and mitigation.

Detection of causative agents of bacterial pneumonia in hospitalized hajj and umrah cases by multiplex real-time polymerase chain reaction.

Background and Objectives: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) is commonly detected in pneumonia patients who travel from the Middle East regions. Besides MERS-CoV, many other pathogenic agents cause pneumonia. Detection of such organisms must be done swiftly, especially in case of the negative MERS-CoV samples. The aim of this study was to identify the pathogenic agents that might account for bacterial pneumonia, from Hajj and Umrah pneumonia cases. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study, 38 pneumonia clinical samples from suffering of Hajj and Umrah in 2017 with negative MERS-CoV were selected. The laboratory testing was done at National Reference Laboratory in Jakarta and performed by multiplex real-time PCR using a FTD respiratory pathogens. Results: Haemophilus influenzae (26.4%) was the most frequent bacteria detected. Other causative agents of bacterial pneumonia identified were Moraxella catarrhalis (20.8%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (13.2%), Streptococcus pneumoniae (9.4%), and Staphylococcus aureus (5.7%). From 38 samples showed that 25 (65.79%) samples were positive with bacteria, including five samples with coinfection. The coinfection were combinations among S. aureus and S. pneumoniae (1/20), S. pneumoniae and K. pneumoniae (1/20), S. pneumoniae and M. catarrhalis (2/20), S. pneumoniae and H. influenzae (2/20), K. pneumoniae and H. influenzae (5/20), and M. catarrhalis and H. influenzae (5/20). Conclusion: Haemophilus influenzae is the most recurrent bacteria to be identified in samples of pneumonia of hajj and umrah cases.

Hajj and Umrah management during COVID-19.

COVID-19 has changed the way crowded events are organised. Every year thousands of crowded events are organised around the globe. Majority of the crowded events are religious in nature, with sensitivities and emotions attached. Organisation of crowded events, especially during a pandemic like COVID-19, poses a considerable challenge. To contain the spread of a human to human contagious disease, several restrictions, including wearing face masks, maintain social distancing, and adhering to regular cleaning and sanitisation, are critical. These restrictions stress the need for the event organisers, including the local or central government, to overhaul policies and practices about crowd management during a pandemic. Some crowded events are regular, whereas the others are occasional, which could be spontaneous such as a protest march, a political rally or a funeral procession. Controlling spontaneous crowded events can be quite difficult, especially during a crisis like COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we shall review several crowded events which have taken place during the ongoing pandemic and investigate their impact and contribution in the spreading or containing COVID-19. We shall also provide a framework for effectively organising crowded events during the ongoing and future pandemics.

Behavior Analysis-Based IoT Services For Crowd Management

With the world population growing exponentially reaching 7.8 billion people in 2020, the issue of crowd management has become more difficult especially when the situation requires social distancing (e.g. due to COVID-19). The Internet of Things (IoT) technology can help in tackling such issues. In this article, we propose a behavior analysis-based IoT services architecture for crowd management. We propose to use a behavior analysis approach based on using generative model as Hidden Markov Model to help crowd managers to make good decisions in invoking IoT services. The proposed approach is based on sectioning video segments captured from surveillance cameras of locations that require crowd management into spatio-temporal flow-blocks for marginalization of arbitrarily dense flow field. Then, each flow-block is classified as normal and abnormal. To demonstrate our approach, we used a real case study where crowd management is required namely, Muslim's pilgrimage (i.e. Hajj and Umrah), where real dataset is used for experimenting. The results of the experiments we have conducted are promising in real-time performance. Such results are expected to compare favorably to those found in the literature by other researchers.

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON THE MANAGEMENT OF UMRAH PACKAGE OPERATIONS IN MALAYSIA

Umrah package operations in Malaysia have recorded a significant increase every year. Before leaving for Umrah, Muslims need to make various preparations including travel, operations, and worship. So far, the management of umrah operations must adhere to the MPPU requirements. Nevertheless, this management manual still fails to produce quality management standards in monitoring the entire operation of umrah packages in Malaysia. Some problems such as the misuse of operating licenses, taking excessive profits, and handling of unregistered packages still occur. However, the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) global outbreak has resulted in many countries implementing travel restrictions and movement controls. In Malaysia, the business sector is one of the sectors directly affected by the movement control order (MCO). In summary, using the qualitative and quantitative methods, the findings of the study found that covid-19 had a significant impact on umrah operators. Therefore, it is hoped that improvement in the assistance provided can ensure the continuity of their business. © 2021, CA and C Press AB. All rights reserved.

Measuring the impact of suspending Umrah, a global mass gathering in Saudi Arabia on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the early days of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan, China, Saudi Arabia started to implement several preventative measures starting with the imposition of travel restrictions to and from China. Due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, and with the first confirmed case in Saudi Arabia in March 2019, more strict measures, such as international travel restriction, and suspension or cancellation of major events, social gatherings, prayers at mosques, and sports competitions, were employed. These non-pharmaceutical interventions aim to reduce the extent of the epidemic due to the implications of international travel and mass gatherings on the increase in the number of new cases locally and globally. Since this ongoing outbreak is the first of its kind in the modern world, the impact of suspending mass gatherings on the outbreak is unknown and difficult to measure. We use a stratified SEIR epidemic model to evaluate the impact of Umrah, a global Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, on the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic during the month of Ramadan, the peak of the Umrah season. The analyses shown in the paper provide insights into the effects of global mass gatherings such as Hajj and Umrah on the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic locally and globally.

Assessment of Preventative Measures Practice among Umrah Pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, 1440H-2019.

:Background: Annually, approximately 10 million pilgrims travel to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for Umrah from more than 180 countries. This event presents major challenges for the Kingdom's public health sector, which strives to decrease the burden of infectious diseases and to adequately control their spread both in KSA and pilgrims home nations. The aims of the study were to assess preventative measures practice, including vaccination history and health education, among Umrah pilgrims in Saudi Arabia. Methods: A cross sectional survey was administered to pilgrims from February to April 2019 at the departure lounge at King Abdul Aziz International airport, Jeddah city. The questionnaire comprised questions on sociodemographic information (age, gender, marital status, level of education, history of vaccinations and chronic illnesses), whether the pilgrim had received any health education and orientation prior to coming to Saudi Arabia or on their arrival, and their experiences with preventative practices. Results: Pilgrims (n = 1012) of 41 nationalities completed the survey. Chronic diseases were reported among pilgrims (n = 387, 38.2%) with cardiovascular diseases being the most reported morbidity (n = 164, 42.3%). The majority of pilgrims had been immunized prior to travel to Saudi Arabia (n = 770, 76%). The most commonly reported immunizations were influenza (n = 514, 51%), meningitis (n = 418, 41%), and Hepatitis B virus vaccinations (n = 310, 31%). However, 242 (24%) had not received any vaccinations prior to travel, including meningitis vaccine and poliomyelitis vaccine, which are mandatory by Saudi Arabian health authorities for pilgrims coming from polio active countries. Nearly a third of pilgrims (n = 305; 30.1%) never wore a face mask in crowded areas during Umrah in 2019. In contrast, similar numbers said they always wore a face mask (n = 351, 34.6%) in crowded areas, while 63.2% reported lack of availability of face masks during Umrah. The majority of participants had received some form of health education on preventative measures, including hygiene aspects (n = 799, 78.9%), mostly in their home countries (n = 450, 44.4%). A positive association was found between receiving health education and practicing of preventative measures, such as wearing face masks in crowded areas (p = 0.04), and other health practice scores (p = 0.02). Conclusion: Although the experiences of the preventative measures among pilgrims in terms of health education, vaccinations, and hygienic practices were at times positive, this study identified several issues. These included the following preventative measures: immunizations, particularly meningitis and poliomyelitis vaccine, and using face masks in crowded areas. The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for further studies that focus on development of accessible health education in a form that engages pilgrims to promote comprehensive preventative measures during Umrah and Hajj and other religious pilgrimages.

Hajj and Umrah Mass Gatherings and COVID-19 Infection.

Purpose of Review: We discuss the risk of COVID-19 in religious mass gathering events including Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages. Recent Findings: The risk of transmission of respiratory viruses including COVID-19 is particularly high due to the overcrowding conditions at the Hajj and Umrah. The profile of the Hajj pilgrims who tend to be older and with multiple comorbidities corresponds to that of individuals at risk for severe COVID-19. In order to avoid a COVID-19 outbreak with potential spreading to many countries through returning pilgrims, Saudi Arabia suspended the Umrah, and access to the 2020 Hajj was very limited. Summary: A clear relation between early suspension of religious mass gatherings and lower occurrence of COVID-19 transmission in countries that took such measures promptly was noticed. There are lessons to national and international health organizations for other mass gatherings in the context of the pandemic.

The cancellation of mass gatherings (MGs)? Decision making in the time of COVID-19.

Our recommendation, as experts who have monitored health hazards at the Hajj for over 15 years, especially if the situation with COVID-19 continues to escalate globally is that Hajj 2020 will be at risk of being suspended and a means for Muslims to fulfill their rights in the future either personally or even by proxy need to be announced. The same holds true for the Summer 2020 Olympics in Japan and for many other MGs and large gatherings. Decisions in the time of COVID-19 will be closely followed and will be a blueprint for other mass gatherings.