Death managers, public health, and COVID-19: An exploratory study

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated cracks in the United States' healthcare systems-along with its deathcare systems. The pandemic as an ongoing mass fatality incident highlights the need to understand the public servants engaged in deathcare work, as they are a vital part of the emergency response equation. This exploratory, descriptive study focuses on the ways in which medical examiners and coroners (ME/Cs) in the United States provide core emergency management services to communities, relying on findings from interviews with 18 ME/Cs throughout the country. Findings indicate how COVID-19 cases are counted is difficult, the pandemic changed how ME/Cs operate in response, and burnout is eminent for these public servants.

Emotional eating in relation to gastrointestinal symptoms and burnout among young women during the pandemic

Background: The emergence of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), created unique constraints in everyday life. Emotional eating is a known phenomenon in disasters and is markedly associated with gastrointestinal symptoms. In this study, the aim was to assess the relationship of gastrointestinal symptom severity and COVID-19 burnout with emotional eating among young women during the pandemic disaster. Methods: A cross-sectional study approach was used to allow 462 young women participants in this study. The design of the questionnaires was based on demographics, health behaviors, Gastrointestinal Symptom Severity Scale, Emotional Eating Scale and COVID-19 Burnout Scale. Data were analyzed using percentages, mean values, independent t-test, chi-squared test. The hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed for predicting risk factors of emotional eating. Significance levels were set at the 5% level. Results: Of the women, 73.8% were emotional eaters. The level of COVID-19 burnout was moderate with mean score of 29.4+or-11.1 and emotional eating total score was 21.0+or-8.1. Increased number of meals, increased weight gain and shorter sleep time were significantly associated with emotional eating (p<0.05). Participants with more than three meals per day were more likely to be emotional eaters (Beta=4.26). The regression model showed that indigestion and COVID-19 burnout were strong risk factors of emotinal eating (p<0.05). Conclusions: This study demonstrated that indigestion and COVID-19 burnout were strong risk factors of emotinal eating. Emotional eating could pose an additional health burden to young women in the form of poor food choices.

Examination of the Effects of COVID-19 on Happiness in Different Geographical Regions with Piecewise Linear Panel Data Models

The COVID-19 pandemic has recently caused the loss of millions of lives, and billions of others have been deeply affected. This crisis has changed the way people live, think about life, and perceive happiness. The aim of this study is to reveal differences between geographical regions by investigating the effect of the happiness variable on different countries during the international COVID-19 pandemic. The primary purpose is to demonstrate how such a pandemic may affect different countries in terms of happiness at the individual level and to identify possible strategies for the future. With this aim, both static and dynamic panel data models were used while applying fixed effects, random effects, and the generalized method of moments (GMM). A basic assumption in panel data models is that the coefficients do not change over time. This assumption is unlikely to hold, however, especially during major devastating events like COVID-19. Therefore, the piecewise linear panel data model was applied in this study. As a result of empirical analysis, pre- and post-COVID differences were seen between different geographical regions. Based on analysis conducted for three distinct geographical regions with piecewise linear models, it was determined that the piecewise random effects model was appropriate for European and Central Asian countries, the piecewise FGLS model for Latin American and Caribbean countries, and the piecewise linear GMM model for South Asian countries. According to the results, there are many variables that affect happiness, which vary according to different geographical conditions and societies with different cultural values.

Governing systemic and cascading disaster risk in Indonesia: where do we stand and future outlook

PurposeThis paper aims to identify key factors for a contextualised Systemic Risk Governance (SRG) framework and subsequently explore how systemic risks can be managed and how local institutional mechanisms can be tweaked to deal with the complex Indonesian risk landscape.Design/methodology/approachUsing a case study from Palu triple-disasters in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, the authors demonstrate how inland earthquakes in 2018 created cascading secondary hazards, namely tsunamis, liquefactions and landslides, caused unprecedented disasters for the communities and the nation. A qualitative analysis was conducted using the data collected through a long-term observation since 2002.FindingsThe authors argue that Indonesia has yet to incorporate an SRG approach in its responses to the Palu triple-disasters. Political will is required to adopt more appropriate risk governance modes that promote the systemic risk paradigm. Change needs to occur incrementally through hybrid governance arrangements ranging from formal/informal methods to self- and horizontal and vertical modes of governance deemed more realistic and feasible. The authors recommend that this be done by focusing on productive transition and local transformation.Originality/valueThere is growing awareness and recognition of the importance of systemic and cascading risks in disaster risk studies. However, there are still gaps between research, policy and practice. The current progress of disaster risk governance is not sufficient to achieve the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030) unless there is an effective governing system in place at the local level that allow actors and institutions to simultaneously manage the interplays of multi-hazards, multi-temporal, multi-dimensions of vulnerabilities and residual risks. This paper contributes to these knowledge gaps.

Internal migration during COVID-19 pandemic: an analysis through the lens of social organisations

In March 2020, a large number of people moved from cities to their homes in rural areas, and a few months later, many returned to cities. These journeys were undertaken not only during the COVID-19 pandemic against the advisory of governments and public health experts, but the circumstances of travel were also under extreme hardship. How may we understand this intense response by people? By drawing on the migration theory and the roles of social ties or social organisation, we can better explain peoples' reactions during this pandemic. Notably, we find non-material values, such as the dignity of labour or responsibilities to family, are significant to decision -making, and there is a desire not to compromise on these values. Further, our analyses find that the distinction between pre-disaster and post-disaster situations may not be helpful.

Social cash assistance for food security during a disaster: lesson learned from Indonesia

There was a change in the environment and food security threat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries, including Indonesia, are forced to allocate funds to reduce the risk of this disaster. The Government Republic of Indonesia, through the Ministry of Social Affairs, has launched a Social Cash Assistance Program for 10 million families affected by COVID-19. This study aims to identify how families affected by COVID-19 take advantage of this social cash assistance. The study was conducted on the beneficiaries of social assistance, in cash transfer of IDR 600,000 (USD 40), per month, for three months. This study involved 2290 beneficiaries as respondents spread across 12 provinces. The sampling technique was the Cohen Manion Morrison Table by proportional stratified random sampling. The findings show that (1) 99% of cash assistance is used for basic needs, especially for food, and (2) cash assistance could be used for basic needs for around two to three weeks, thereby strengthening food security. Recommendations are submitted based on the results of this study related to social cash assistance and food security. The first is that this assistance still needs to be continued until the COVID-19 pandemic is over. It is to help families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic meet their daily needs. Second, most respondents do not have a fixed income during the pandemic, so providing capital and business startups are needed to increase family income sustainably to maintain food security.

Templated Crisis Communication for People With Disabilities, Access and Functional Needs

Despite the Americans with Disabilities Act being more than 30 years old, many government institutions fail to fully support their constituents, and provide understandable and actionable crisis communications before, during, and after emergencies and disasters. When residents do not effectively receive, understand, and act on crisis communications in a timely manner, life safety issues can occur. People may choose not to evacuate when necessary or lack the information for properly sheltering-in-place. These and other bad decisions can be deadly. Crisis communications, as a subset of risk communications, should be aligned with all the disaster phase cycles—the before, during, and after stages of disasters and crises—so that impacted residents obtain complete information they can use. U.S. government websites, including posted crisis communications public releases, must be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) under Title II and they should use templated crisis communications available in other languages, English-only audio recordings, and videos of American Sign Language.

Overview of the FIRE 2022 track: Information Retrieval from Microblogs during Disasters (IRMiDis)

Microblogging sites such as Twitter play an important role in dealing with various mass emergencies including natural disasters and pandemics. The FIRE 2022 track on Information Retrieval from Microblogs during Disasters (IRMiDis) focused on two important tasks – (i) to detect the vaccine-related stance of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines, and (ii) to detect reporting of COVID-19 symptom in tweets. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

A Slow-Rolling Disaster: Assessing the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Militant Violence

Despite alarming predications about the Covid 19 pandemic that appear to fit the literature on the impact of natural disasters on civil wars, there are reasons to be suspicious that a rise in militant violence would likely occur quickly or uniformly. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is most definitely a disaster that caught the world by surprise, this "slow-rolling” shock differs in important ways from the more commonly studied acute onset natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis that often increase violent competition among groups for scarce resources. Instead, the effects of slow-rolling disasters unfold in phases that, at least in the short run, are likely to encourage a period of relative decline in violence, as actors try and assess the effects of COVID-19 on their organization and their opponents. Both statistical and qualitative evidence from the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic supports the initial phases of our theory. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Conflict Resolution is the property of Sage Publications Inc. 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 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 . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The Role of Information Sources on Tourist Behavior Post-Earthquake Disaster in Indonesia: A Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) Approach

The earthquake disaster has an impact on tourist visit intention. This study aims to investigate tourist behavior in the post-earthquake disaster linkage between information sources (word of mouth and electronic word of mouth) and risk perception toward tourists' visit intentions to a destination in Indonesia. This study applies the SOR theory to predict tourists' behavior in the destination aftermath. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Model was used to examine the hypothesis of the study. The result found that information sources (electronic word of mouth and word of mouth) significantly influenced visit intention in the time of post-earthquake disaster. The risk perception has not significantly influenced visit intention in post-earthquake disasters. The discussion and conclusion of the study are discussed herein. Overall, the findings of the study may contribute to the theory by adding information sources to predict tourist behavior post-earthquake disaster and also gives a practical contribution to the tourism sector, stakeholders, tourism marketers, and policymakers in Indonesia to enhance the marketing strategy by considering destination promotion through word of mouth (offline) and electronic word of mouth (online) and its mechanism on tourists' travel decision in the time of aftermath.

Classification of Covid-19 Vaccine Opinion and Detection of Symptom-Reporting on Twitter Using Neural Networks

This paper describes my work for the Information Retrieval from Microblogs during Disasters.This track is divided into two sub-tasks. Task 1 is to build an effective classifier for 3-class classification on tweets with respect to the stance reflected towards COVID-19 vaccines.Task 2 is to devise an effective classifier for 4-class classification on tweets that can detect tweets that report someone experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.This paper proposes a classification method based on MLP classifier model.The evaluation shows the performance of our approach, which achieved 0.304 on F-Score in Task 1 and 0.239 on F-Score in Task 2. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

COVID – 19: A Critical Ontology of the present1

COVID-19 has crowned a number of other disasters (wildfires in Australia, Desert Locusts in Kenya, an imminent WWIII merging Iran and the US), causing panic to click into place and horror to become our global predicament, making us realize that we live in the illusion of the permanence of things, of mastery, and of immortality. People's turning to social media for trans-local news on COVID-19 has stirred great ire in the world. This led to the proliferation of dark images that associate the viral catastrophe with the end as we know it. To problematize the idea of the apocalypse (or the end) this paper speaks of three moments of survival in human existence: the beneath, the behind and the beyond. We argue that the apocalyptic nature of the pandemic and its global horrorism are part of a congeries of apocalyptic simulations that have always been part of the narrative with which we try to define ourexistence on earth. This paper masks itself against perfunctory examinations of the term apocalypse, and offers instead an understanding that runs along the lines of its Greek etymological sense as apokalyptein (revelation). It offers what Foucault calls an ontology of the present, that interrogates the history of COVID -19 with an emphasis neither on its origin nor on its telos. As beyondists, the COVID-19 catastrophe has revealed to us that 1) we have ‘access to knowledge beyond knowledge' (see Gumpert 2012), and therefore that 2) our modern predicament is not very modern. The end, (not) to be sure, has been lived and relived in the boundary between reality and simulation. After all, the end of something comprises the beginning (in reverse) of that which "endeth”, throwing the beyond, behind and beneath in the Ferris wheel of epistemological and existential entanglement.

After the Virus: Disaster Capitalism, Digital Inequity, and Transformative Education for the Future of Schooling

The 2020 COVID-19 disaster triggered an educational crisis in the United States, deeply exacerbating the inequities present in education as schools went online. This primary impact may not be the only one, however: literature describes a secondary impact of such disasters through "disaster capitalism," in which the private sector captures the public resources of disaster-struck communities for profit. In response to these warnings, we ask how schools, families, and communities can counteract disaster capitalism for educational equity. To address this question, we first synthesize a critical framework for analyzing digital inequity in education. We then dissect the strategies disaster capitalism uses to attack the school-family-community relationship and exacerbate digital inequity in "normal" times as well as during crises. Employing the notion of community funds of knowledge, we next examine the resources schools, families, and communities can mobilize against disaster capitalism and digital inequity. Finally, guided by the concepts of generative change and transformative learning, we consider actionable practices of countering disaster capitalism for a transformative education. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Education & Urban Society is the property of Sage Publications Inc. 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 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 . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Engineering in a Crisis: Observing Students' Perceptions of Macroethical Responsibilities during Pandemics and Natural Disasters

When the ethical responsibilities of engineers are discussed in classrooms, the focus is usually on microethics, which concentrates on individual decision-making, rather than macroethics, that addresses broad societal concerns. Pandemics (e.g., COVID-19) and natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, derechos) have presented unique opportunities to observe engineering macroethical responsibilities, because unjust social, economic, and environmental systems have been brought to the forefront amidst the responses (e.g., inequitable transportation access). In this paper, we consider pandemics and natural disasters through the lens of engineering macroethics, aiming to understand students' perceptions about the macroethical responsibilities of engineers. In the fall of 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate engineering students at two universities (n=424). Students were asked to discuss what they perceived to be the role of engineering professionals in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters. We used a qualitative content analysis to explore the macroethical responsibilities mentioned in students' responses. Many of these responses include considerations of infrastructure resilience, resource distribution, and community equity. Logit models were used to identify which sociodemographic factors were associated with responses that included macroethical responsibilities, revealing engineering major (specifically, civil engineering), employment status, gender identity, and family size, among others as significant factors. The implications from this study include recommendations on curricular content, and identifying which student sociodemographic groups would especially benefit from macroethical content in coursework. © 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Learning Social Meta-knowledge for Nowcasting Human Mobility in Disaster

Human mobility nowcasting is a fundamental research problem for intelligent transportation planning, disaster responses and management, etc. In particular, human mobility under big disasters such as hurricanes and pandemics deviates from its daily routine to a large extent, which makes the task more challenging. Existing works mainly focus on traffic or crowd flow prediction in normal situations. To tackle this problem, in this study, disaster-related Twitter data is incorporated as a covariate to understand the public awareness and attention about the disaster events and thus perceive their impacts on the human mobility. Accordingly, we propose a Meta-knowledge-Memorizable Spatio-Temporal Network (MemeSTN), which leverages memory network and meta-learning to fuse social media and human mobility data. Extensive experiments over three real-world disasters including Japan 2019 typhoon season, Japan 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and US 2019 hurricane season were conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution. Compared to the state-of-the-art spatio-temporal deep models and multivariate-time-series deep models, our model can achieve superior performance for nowcasting human mobility in disaster situations at both country level and state level. © 2023 ACM.

Kidney health for all: preparedness for the unexpected in supporting the vulnerable

As the rate of natural disasters and other devastating events caused by human activities increases, the burden on the health and well-being of those affected by kidney disease has been immeasurable. Health system preparedness, which involves creating a resilient system that is able to deal with the health needs of the entire community during times of unexpected disruptions to usual care, has become globally important. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a heightened awareness of the amplification of negative effects on the renal community. Paradoxically, the complex medical needs of those who have kidney diseases are not met by systems handling crises, often compounded by an acute increase in burden via new patients as a result of the crisis itself. Disruptions in kidney care as a result of unexpected events are becoming more prevalent and likely to increase in the years to come. It is therefore only appropriate that the theme for this year's World Kidney Day will focus on Kidney Health for All: preparedness for the unexpected in supporting the vulnerable. © 2023 JSC Vidal Rus. All rights reserved.

Housing inequalities and resilience: the lived experience of COVID-19

COVID-19 policy responses have intensified the use of housing as a spatial and material defence against community spread of infection. In so doing, they have focussed attention upon pre-existing inequalities and the effects of socio-economic management of COVID-19. This paper draws upon individual households' accounts to explore these effects on housing inequalities, and then adapts a critical resilience framework from disaster response in order to examine the implications for policymaking. The empirical work centres upon a case study of lived experiences of COVID-19-constrained conditions, based on a longitudinal-style study combining semi-structured interviews with 40 households, photographs and household tours at two datapoints (before/during COVID-19) in Victoria, Australia. The study reveals how these households were impacted across four domains: (1) employment, finances, services, and mobilities;(2) homemaking including comfort and energy bills, food and provisioning, and home-schooling/working from home;(3) relationships, care and privacy, and;(4) social, physical and mental health. The interviews also indicate how households coped and experienced relief payments and other related support policies during COVID-19. Drawing upon literature on disaster response, we highlight the centrality of vulnerability and resilience in recognising household exposure and sensitivity to COVID-19, and capabilities in coping. From this analysis, gaps in COVID-19 housing and welfare policy are exposed and guide a discussion for future housing policy interventions and pandemic planning.

Reading Chinese anti-COVID-19 pandemic narratives on facemasks as the art of disaster governance: a semiotic and biopolitical survey

In China and around the world, the global spread of COVID-19 has made wearing a facemask more than a pragmatic or aesthetic individual-level issue: it has instilled in people deontic value. In Chinese anti-epidemic narratives, the semiotic ideology of wearing a facemask has been closely related to collectivism, patriotism and, to a certain degree, nationalism. The facemask not only serves as a protective biomedical device but also as a cultural, political and spatial sign of the line of defence against disorders of the natural system, to establish the order of the social system. This paper argues from the perspective of semiotics and life politics that such mask narratives have effectively helped China prevent the large-scale spread of the epidemic across the nation and have served as a means of collective psychotherapy, paradoxically transforming individual separation into collective spiritual cohesion. Previous semiotic studies of disaster have not paid much attention to plagues or disaster governance discourse, between which biomedicine plays an important role. Thus, this paper aims to shed light on how biomedicine works with politics in coding and decoding the relationship between the natural system of the plague and the social system of governance.

How can tourism destinations regain public support under public health emergencies? - An empirical study based on the underdog effect

Disasters and crises such as COVID-19 can have a negative effect on the images of tourism destinations. However, existing studies have mainly focused on the recovery of such images after crises;little research has examined the reasons for reversing the image of epidemic-resistant tourism destinations and their renewed popularity. This article investigates tourism destination image management in the context of epidemics. By means of the underdog effect, this paper examines the influence of two factors-the severity of an epidemic and degree of anti-epidemic efforts-on public willingness to travel following that epidemic;it does so through a pre-study and two formal experiments, and it investigates the mechanisms underlying the effect of those two factors on willingness to travel. The following findings emerged. First, public perceptions of tourism destinations' anti-epidemic efforts were mainly evident in four ways: government measures, social support, tourism labor actions, and destination residents' attitudes. Second, there was an interactive effect between the degree of tourism destinations' anti-epidemic efforts and the severity of the epidemic in tourism destinations: destinations with high epidemic severity received the same public support as those with low epidemic severity when they displayed a higher degree of anti-epidemic efforts. Third, public empathic responses played a mediating role in those processes. The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows. First, it enhances research on the recovery of tourism destination image in the context of disasters and crises;it proposes the novel idea of underdog image building as a way of reversing tourism destination image. Second, it expands theoretical research on the underdog effect in tourism: it shows that in the context of public health events such as epidemics, the underdog effect has its own conditions and time influences. Third, this study enriches research on tourists' emotions and feelings: it clarifies the important role of tourism destinations' efforts to deal with epidemics and reverse the negative impacts of an epidemic. This paper provides suggestions for reversing the negative image of tourism destinations and promoting positive emotions for marketing following public health emergencies. This study finds that tourism destinations should do the following. First, modify information related to an underdog state to promote the image of the destination. Second, fully utilize public emotional resources and promote emotional advantages. Third, prevent problems before they arise and improve the tourism public health system.