Pediatric Behavioral Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Expert Advice for Preparedness, Response, and Recovery.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the child mental health crisis and existing disparities. Child anxiety, depression, suicide attempts and completions, and mental-health-related emergency department visits significantly increased. In response to this crisis, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) developed behavioral health task forces associated with funded pediatric centers of disaster excellence. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) funded the Pediatric Pandemic Network (PPN) to prepare for future endemics and pandemics, with behavioral health identified as a priority in mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This commentary provides insights from pediatric disaster preparedness and response behavioral health subject matter experts. Our roles have been to identify how to build behavioral health professional competencies across disciplines and various medical settings and to strengthen emergency interdisciplinary behavioral health care capability regionally and at the national level. Specific examples of interdisciplinary training and demonstration projects are included as models for enhancing behavioral health situational awareness and developing curricula to support preparedness and response for the current ongoing pandemic and future natural and biological disasters. This commentary also includes a call to action for workforce development to move beyond a boots-on-the-ground mentality for pediatric behavioral health disaster preparedness and response toward a more inclusive role for behavioral health providers of varied specialties. This means that behavioral health providers should become more informed of federal programs in this area, seek further training, and find innovative ways to collaborate with their medical colleagues and community partners.

Aging and Feeling Valued Versus Expendable During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: a Review and Commentary of Why Mattering Is Fundamental to the Health and Well-Being of Older Adults.

The current commentary and review examines the potentially protective role of feelings of mattering among elderly people during typical times and the current atypical times associated with the COVID-19 global pandemic. Mattering is the feeling of being important to others in ways that give people the sense that they are valued and other people care about them. We contrast this feeling with messages of not mattering and being expendable and disposable due to ageism, gaps in the provision of care, and apparently economically focused positions taken during the pandemic that disrespect the value, worth, and merits of older persons. We provide a comprehensive review of past research on individual differences in mattering among older adults and illustrate the unique role of mattering in potentially protecting older adults from mental health problems. Mattering is also discussed in terms of its links with loneliness and physical health. This article concludes with a discussion of initiatives and interventions that can be modified and enhanced to instill a sense of mattering among older adults. Key directions for future research are also highlighted along with ways to expand the mattering concept to more fully understand and appreciate the relevance of mattering among older adults.

A comment-driven evidence appraisal approach to promoting research findings into practice when only uncertain evidence is available.

BACKGROUND: Comments in PubMed are usually short papers for supporting or refuting claims, or discussing methods and findings in original articles. This study aims to explore whether they can be used as a quick and reliable evidence appraisal instrument for promoting research findings into practice, especially in emergency situations such as COVID-19 in which only missing, incomplete or uncertain evidence is available. METHODS: Evidence-comment networks (ECNs) were constructed by linking COVID-19-related articles to the commentaries (letters, editorials or brief correspondence) they received. PubTator Central was used to extract entities with a high volume of comments from the titles and abstracts of the articles. Among them, six drugs were selected, and their evidence assertions were analysed by exploring the structural information in the ECNs as well as the sentiment of the comments (positive, negative, neutral). Recommendations in WHO guidelines were used as the gold standard control to validate the consistency, coverage and efficiency of comments in reshaping clinical knowledge claims. RESULTS: The overall positive/negative sentiments of comments were aligned with recommendations for/against the corresponding treatments in the WHO guidelines. Comment topics covered all significant points of evidence appraisal and beyond. Furthermore, comments may indicate the uncertainty regarding drug use for clinical practice. Half of the critical comments emerged 4.25 months earlier on average than the guideline release. CONCLUSIONS: Comments have the potential as a support tool for rapid evidence appraisal as they have a selection effect by appraising the benefits, limitations and other clinical practice issues of concern in existing evidence. We suggest as a future direction an appraisal framework based on the comment topics and sentiment orientations to leverage the potential of scientific commentaries supporting evidence appraisal and decision-making.

When a Party Paper Meets COVID-19: Crisis and Legitimacy in Renmin Ribao's Commentary Articles

Similar to many other countries, journalistic production in China during the first half of 2020 was dominated on a thematic level by the COVID-19 pandemic. The trend included the mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Renmin Ribao. Its news and commentary articles, which are widely republished by other media, influence the country's political life, and contribute to the process of meaning generation in the news discourse and to the CCP's effort to align Chinese citizens to official narratives. Renmin Ribao can therefore provide a relevant source to investigate the relationship between political power and the COVID-19 pandemic, starting from the hypothesis that the paper's narrative would aim at discursively turning the international health crisis into a piece of positive propaganda. This study aims to verify whether and how the paper did so, and to question the assumption that the outlet's media discourse can be equated to the CCP official discourse. The research is developed as a case study and blends quantitative and qualitative tools grounded on Applied Linguistics, Discourse-Historical Approach, and Frame Analysis, in order to analyse a corpus of commentaries that have appeared in the outlet's online edition in 2020. By applying a Genre Analysis approach, the study also offers insights into the possibility to identify distinguishing characteristics and communicative goals in the different sub-genres of Renmin Ribao commentaries. © 2022 Universita degli Studi di Milano. All rights reserved.

#KitaJagaKita: (De)legitimising the Government During the 2020 Movement Control Order

On 18th March 2020, the Malaysian government enforced a movement control order (MCO) that required everyone to stay in their homes until 4th May 2020 to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. During this time, social media became not only a source of information for citizens but also the main space for their mediated social and public lives. Besides the hashtags #stayhome and #dudukrumah, the hashtag #KitaJagaKita started trending as netizens and civil society took the initiative to champion the proper enforcement of the MCO and safe distancing, as well as to find solutions for the shortage of medical safety equipment. This chapter presents findings from a discourse analysis on the discourses surrounding the hashtag #KitaJagaKita on Twitter and its use to (de)legitimise the Perikatan Nasional government and its leader, Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. Pro-government netizens use the hashtag to represent the government as protecting citizens through its policies and guidelines, and fellow citizens, who adhere to the MCO, as partnering in this effort. Netizens who are less supportive of the government, however, argue that the government is not doing enough to protect citizens and healthcare workers. They use the hashtag to criticise government policies and a lack of decisiveness and speed in properly implementing the MCO. They also use the hashtag to rally citizens to take care of each other by fundraising and finding "better” solutions for healthcare workers. © 2023, The Author(s).

Invisible and at-risk: older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the risks to older adults of systemic abuse and neglect have become amplified, alongside increasing abuse and neglect in the community. Novel risks have also evolved involving cybercrime and the use of remote technologies in health and social care related to the pandemic. This commentary brings together lessons to be learned from these developments and initial ideas for actions to mitigate future risks.

Using twitter to investigate responses to street reallocation during COVID-19: Findings from the U.S. and Canada.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged and encouraged local governments to reallocate street space. The chief purpose of new regimes of street management is to expand spaces for walking and bicycling, and to ease business interactions such as curbside pickup and dining while maintaining social distancing guidelines. We investigated how North Americans on Twitter viewed alternative uses and forms of street reallocation, specifically during the early months of the pandemic from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2020. Relying on a crowdsourced dataset of government actions (Combs and Pardo 2021), we identified five areas of policy initiative that were broadly representative of government actions: cycling, walking, driving, business, and curbside. First, we identified a corpus of 292,108 geolocated tweets from the U.S. and Canada. Next, we used word vectors, built on this Twitter corpus, to generate similarity scores across the five areas of policy initiative for each tweet. Finally, we selected the top tweets that closely matched ideas contained in the areas of policy initiative, thus creating a finer corpus of 1,537 tweets. Using the five categories as guideposts, we conducted an inductive content analysis to understand opinions expressed on Twitter. Our analysis suggests that renewed use of the curb has opened up possibilities for reimaging this space. Particularly, business uses of the curb for dining and pick up zones have expanded widely, and there is more use of sidewalks; yet both spaces have limited capacity. Planners need to think of expanding these assets while reducing cost burdens for their alternative uses.

Physician Scientists Of Yesterday, Today And Tomorrow - Published 44(3) September 2021.

In this issue, Ryan Kirkpatrick and Gordon Boyd speculated on the reasons for the dwindling number of physician scientists in Canada. To help stimulate discussion on this important issue, Clinical and Investigative Medicine invited two distinguished scientists to present their views on this issue.

How Our Technology Use Changed in 2020: Perspectives From Three Youths.

The Technology and Adolescent Mental Wellness program (TAM) is a research program with the primary goals of promoting research on the topic of adolescent technology use and mental wellness, creatively disseminating that research, and fostering community among stakeholders. Our foundational question is this: How can technology support adolescent mental wellness? Youth are key stakeholders in pursuit of this foundational question. In this commentary, we invited 3 members of TAM's youth advisory board to respond to the following question: "How did your technology use change in 2020?" Jessica, Jared, and Babayosimi describe their technology use during COVID-19 as dynamic, and neither uniformly positive nor negative. Further, these 3 youths differ in their perceptions of the same technologies-social media and online school, for example-as well as their perceived ability to self-regulate use of those technologies. We invite you to weigh these perspectives just as we do at TAM-not as empirical findings in themselves, but as examples of youth ideas for future empirical investigation.

SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Attitudes as Expressed in U.S. FDA Public Commentary: Need for a Public-Private Partnership in a Learning Immunization System.

As part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration COVID-19 vaccine review process, public commentary was solicited offering an opportunity to reflect on vaccine attitudes that may impact the uptake of coronavirus vaccines. We identified themes in the commentary that highlighted the safety, efficacy, ethics, and trustworthiness and transparency regarding the novel mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. A "Learning Immunization System" model is proposed to optimize public, private, and academic partnerships relating to vaccine development and implementation.

The Impact of COVID-19 on mental health.

COVID-19 Special Issue Commentary.

Perspectives on COVID-19.

A few ideas that deserve to see the light of day. I wrote this essay on 23/3/2020. I have started updating in the form of post scripts. Please relate the information to the date on which it was written.

Academics engaging through the media-Insights from creating a monthly column on crisis management.

Universities increasingly expect academics to engage with external stakeholders. This includes providing media commentary. In this article I describe my experience writing a monthly column on Crisis Management in the New Zealand Herald, the most widely read newspaper in New Zealand with an average daily readership of over 460,000 people (New Zealand Herald, 2019). The article also describes the benefits of writing a newspaper column including educating the public about issues relating to Crisis Management such as managing Covid-19, creating a platform for enhancing collaboration between academics and Public Relations firms, and enhancing the reputation of both the academic and university. This article will benefit academics in the field of Public Relations who are interested in writing a newspaper column to engage through the media.