Immunogenicity of COVID-19 vaccines in chronic liver disease patients and liver transplant recipients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background and aims: Chronic liver disease (CLD) patients and liver transplant (LT) recipients have an increased risk of morbidity and mortality from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The immunogenicity of COVID-19 vaccines in CLD patients and LT recipients is poorly understood. The present study aimed to evaluate the immunogenicity of COVID-19 vaccines in CLD patients and LT recipients. Methods: We searched electronic databases for eligible studies. Two reviewers independently conducted the literature search, extracted the data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. The rates of detectable immune response were pooled from single-arm studies. For comparative studies, we compared the rates of detectable immune response between patients and healthy controls. The meta-analysis was conducted using the Stata software with a random-effects model. Results: In total, 19 observational studies involving 4191 participants met the inclusion criteria. The pooled rates of detectable humoral immune response after two doses of COVID-19 vaccination in CLD patients and LT recipients were 95% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 88%–99%) and 66% (95% CI = 57%–74%) respectively. After two doses of vaccination, the humoral immune response rate was similar in CLD patients and healthy controls (risk ratio [RR] = 0.96;95% CI = 0.90–1.02;p =.14). In contrast, LT recipients had a lower humoral immune response rate after two doses of vaccination than healthy controls (RR = 0.68;95% CI = 0.59–0.77;p <.01). Conclusions : Our meta-analysis demonstrated that COVID-19 vaccination induced strong humoral immune responses in CLD patients but poor humoral immune responses in LT recipients. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Unraveling EFL Teacher Buoyancy in Online Teaching: An Ecological Perspective

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online teaching became a significant method at different levels of education across the globe. The transition from traditional offline to online educational environments brought new challenges for language teachers. Buoyancy plays a crucial role for teachers to bounce back from challenging situations. However, there is a scarcity of empirical research on language teacher buoyancy in online contexts from an ecological perspective which is conducive to unfolding the complex and dynamic nature of buoyancy. To fill this gap, the current study utilized a qualitative research method to investigate the factors influencing English teacher buoyancy in online teaching and how they shape and exercise buoyancy in their negotiation with different ecological systems in online teaching guided by Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory. The findings revealed that teachers experienced multiple challenges from different ecological systems, such as ineffective classroom interaction, work–life imbalance, heavy workload, and higher school requirements. Additionally, teacher buoyancy was shaped by the dynamic interaction between teachers and ecological systems and was not only viewed as the individual's ability but as a socio-ecological product. Based on the above findings, the paper provides some implications for developing and researching language teacher buoyancy in the future. © 2022 by the authors.

Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affects customers' grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Using text-mining techniques (i.e., sentiment analysis, topic modelling) and time series analysis, we analyse 161,921 tweets from leading UK supermarkets during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The results show the causes of sentiment change in each time series and how customer perception changes according to supermarkets' response actions. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study investigates whether responding to a crisis helps retail managers better understand their customers. The results uncover that customers experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection, and grocery companies could benefit from engaging in social media crisis communication with customers. As new variants of COVID-19 keep appearing, emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis. Based on the results of text-mining analysis of consumer perceptions, this study identifies emerging topics in the UK grocery sector in the context of COVID-19 crisis communication and develop the sub-dimensions of service quality assessment into four categories: physical aspects, reliability, personal interaction, and policies. This study reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision. It also sheds light on how future researchers can leverage the power of social media data with multiple text-mining methodologies. © 2022 The Authors

Surviving in Crisis Mode: The Effect of Material Hardship and Social Support on Emotional Wellbeing Among People in Poverty During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a sudden economic crisis that led to increases in hardship and poverty. Motivated by the concern that people living in long-term poverty have few reserves to draw upon in times of crisis and may experience severe consequences, this study focuses on the association between material hardship and emotional wellbeing among people in poverty. The data were collected in two waves of telephone surveys during the pandemic (n = 88). Participants for the study were recruited through social service departments in six cities in Northern Israel. The findings show that COVID-19 increased material hardship, and that material hardship has detrimental effects on the four measures of emotional wellbeing selected (stress, anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms). Informal social support has positive effects on emotional wellbeing but it does not counter the negative effects of material hardship. Policy implications are discussed. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Banking infrastructure and the Paycheck Protection Program during the Covid-19 pandemic

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the US federal government distributed US$800 billion in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to small businesses to preserve employment. Since PPP funding was transmitted through private banks, the characteristics of the regional banking market may have unevenly affected the programme's reach. This paper examines how variations in market concentration and the presence of community banks contributed to PPP disbursement in US counties. It finds that greater regional banking market concentration correlates with fewer PPP loans, but this negative relationship is mitigated by a greater presence of community banks in highly concentrated markets. © 2022 Regional Studies Association.

‘In most supermarkets food does not cost £3 per day …' The impact of the school food voucher scheme during COVID-19

Households with children eligible for Free School Meals are at risk of food insecurity. This paper reports on a rapid-response study that investigated the impact of the school food voucher scheme during the COVID-19 crisis on young people, families and schools. It pays close attention to the reliance of the state on the goodwill of society and its citizens in feeding those most in need. The Capabilities Approach is used to highlight factors that inhibited and restricted the use of the vouchers to produce the capability of having good nutrition for children in need of Free School Meals. The approach moves towards creating a society where children and young people are able to lead a life of their own choice and contribute to key policy decisions. This qualitative study funded by the British Education Research Association was conducted between September 2020 and March 2021. The study posed two research questions: (1) how have schools responded to COVID-19 in relation to food during holiday provision;and (2) what have families identified as barriers to accessing the school food voucher scheme? Data collection involved online interviews with young people, schools and organisations (i.e. public health, director from the food industry. etc.). The findings highlight the difficulties with accessing and using the school food voucher and implications for future policy directions. Owing to this being a small-scale study, it is not generalisable to the wider population but does highlight localised issues. © 2022 The Author. British Educational Research Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association.

Pandemic effects on the reading trajectories of deaf and hard of hearing students: a pilot analysis

It is important to understand the nature of the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic had upon student learning, especially those at risk such as deaf students. The limited communication that many deaf students have at home may mean less support is available for learning remotely. Reading may be one of the areas where progress was diminished. We collected Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) scores in reading from deaf students in a residential school for the deaf in grades 3 to 12 every fall and spring from 2016 to 2021. A cohort-sequential approach yielded growth data (2570 observations), with 546 students measured up to 10 times each. As is typical of MAP reading achievement in grades 3 to 12, growth was steep in early grades, slowing in later grades. Students in the Alternative Curriculum performed lower and grew slower. Cohorts differed, with more recent cohorts typically having higher performance than older cohorts. Tenure had a substantial effect, suggesting that students who had been in the school for the deaf longer had higher performance compared to students who joined the school as older students. The pandemic appeared to have a strong, but diminishing effect in each semester, but this effect differed widely across demographic groups. This suggests that effects of the pandemic are neither clear nor simple for deaf students even within the same school. These findings have implications for understanding how the impact of pandemic may vary as a function of deaf students' educational experiences and other demographic factors. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

One shot learning approach for cross spectrum periocular verification

The use of face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the popularity of the periocular biometrics in surveillance applications. Despite of the rapid advancements in this area, matching images over cross spectrum is still a challenging problem. Reason may be two-fold 1) variations in image illumination 2) small size of available data sets and/or class imbalance problem. This paper proposes Siamese architecture based convolutional neural networks which works on the concept of one-shot classification. In one shot classification, network requires a single training example from each class to train the complete model which may lead to reduce the need of large dataset as well as doesn't matter whether the dataset is imbalance. The proposed architectures comprise of identical subnetworks with shared weights whose performance is assessed on three publicly available databases namely IMP, UTIRIS and PolyU with four different loss functions namely Binary cross entropy loss, Hinge loss, contrastive loss and Triplet loss. In order to mitigate the inherent illumination variations of cross spectrum images CLAHE was used to preprocess images. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Siamese CNN model with triplet loss function outperforms the states of the art periocular verification methods for cross, mono and multi spectral periocular image matching. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Post Covid Anxiety Among University Students in Odisha India

From the last two years due to emergence of COVID-19, a first pandemic of the century, caused hard time to continuing normal lifestyle in all aspects including the campus lifestyle of students. All the academic activities such as classes, examinations, evaluations and placement are going as usual in online mode like earlier. In this regard, we have conducted a Web-based survey on students about their mental condition concerning corona anxiety, coping with stress, worry, and fear. In our survey, 620 students participated from different discipline and states to rejoin the campus either online or offline mode. 372 (60%) students want to attend offline classes while 248 (40%) students want online classes. Additionally, generating the rules using a rough set approach to identify corona anxiety in students. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

A comprehensive review on the production of alternative fuel through medical plastic waste

This paper aims to critically review the production of alternative fuels through medical plastic waste. In the recent past, medical plastic waste has been disposed of and incinerated in the dumping yards, which is the main cause of the threat of infection and environmental hazards. Adopting proper waste management and the appropriate technology like the 5R's (refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, and recycle) may significantly improve the ecosystem. Moreover, the 5R's is a comprehensive approach that can be applied, either awareness of stakeholders or enforcement mandate and regulation by the government. The current review suggested the possible route for converting medical-plastic waste into drop-in fuel and value-added products to minimize the waste through suitable technology. In this, the pyrolysis technique plays an important role which is more ecologically friendly, effective and produces minimal pollutants. It has been observed that using COVID medical waste management (CMWM) technology, 70–80 % plastic pyrolysis oil (PPO), 10–15% bio-char, and gaseous fuel can be extracted. As per the ASTM, the extracted PPO is a potential feedstock for the CI engine fuel. This review work provides a suitable solution for CMWM and improves the quality of medical infrastructure for sanitation in a sustainable mode. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

An integrative framework for business model innovation in the tourism industry旅游业商业模式创新的综合框架

These are constantly changing times for the tourism industry. The COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying negative economic effects significantly impacted customer behavior and accelerated the need for companies to innovate. Business model innovation (BMI) is ideal for overcome these challenges by innovating the very core of the firm. However, siloed BMI thinking is insufficient: firms need a more holistic approach. We expand the current understanding of business model innovation by proposing a framework that integrates relevant dimensions (change impulses and business model configurations), context factors (service newness and degree of change or destination characteristics), and the outcomes of BMI initiatives into a comprehensive model for the tourism industry context. With our work, we want to guide future research and expand the currently unbalanced, heterogeneous picture of BMI in service industries. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Cost-effectiveness of a mathematical modeling with optimal control approach of spread of COVID-19 pandemic: A case study in Peru

COVID-19 pandemic affects 213 countries and regions around the world. Which the number of people infected with the virus exceeded 26 millions infected and more than 870 thousand deaths until september 04, 2020, in the world, and Peru among the countries most affected by this pandemic. So we proposed a mathematical model describes the dynamics of spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Peru. The optimal control strategy based on the model is proposed, and several reasonable and suitable control strategies are suggested to the prevention and reduce the spread COVID-19 virus, by conducting awareness campaigns and quarantine with treatment. coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). Pontryagin's maximum principle is used to characterize the optimal controls and the optimality system is solved by an iterative method. Finally, some numerical simulations are performed to verify the theoretical analysis using Matlab. © 2022

The Unusual Increase in Suicides Among Women in Japan During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Time-series Analysis Until October 2021

Background: Japan has witnessed an unusual increase in the number of suicides among women during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. An analysis is required to identify the influencing factors during the pandemic and develop new measures for preventing suicides. Methods: Data on the number of monthly suicides were collected from the National Police Agency of Japan. The expected number of suicides among women during the pandemic was estimated using a time-series model based on pre-pandemic data, considering year-to-year trends. The observed-to-expected (O/E) ratio of suicides was estimated from March 2020 to October 2021 using job status, suicide motive, and age. Results: The number of suicides among women in Japan increased beyond the expected number until October 2021. The O/E ratio based on job status, suicide motive, and age (except self-employed, unknown job status, and women aged ≥80 years) was significantly above 1.0 from March–December 2020, and the increase in suicides continued in almost all categories in 2021. Conclusion: Although several reasons were reported for increased suicides among women in Japan during the pandemic (eg, economic downturn, financial instability, and loneliness), suicides increased irrespective of job status, suicide motive, or age. Comprehensive measures to prevent suicide might have been important during the pandemic, instead of limiting interventions to the reported specific population. © 2022 Kohtaro Kikuchi et al.

Hybrid Approach to Predict the Death Rate of COVID-19 Patients

From closedown of December 2019, coronavirus has directly exhibited a lofty rate of transmission, coercing the World Health Organization to contend in the month of March 2020 that this unbeknownst coronavirus can be depicted as a pandemic. COVID-19 epidemic has guided to an operatic misplacement of deathly life over the public and presents an unbeknownst complaint to public fitness. It also affects the food systems of the person and the world of work. Once the person is infected by COVID, the metabolic exertion of vulnerable cells in his or her body is enhanced, similar as the one driven by COVID-19. The country's dietary habits are analyzed to predict the particular person's death rate. By using KNN algorithm, the performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score are evaluated for the country's dietary habits. In this research, both clustering and classification are combined to increase the accuracy of the prediction of death rate of the person. K-means is used for the clustering of the countries, and KNN is used for classifying the countries. The 170 countries are clustered based on the country's dietary habits, and other disease affected rate using K-means clustering algorithm. Countries are clustered into high and normal death rate countries based on the country's dietary habits and another cluster into high and normal death rate based on the other disease affected rate rather than COVID-19. Using the country's dietary habits and other disease affected clusters, the death rate of the person is predicted. After clustering the data based on the country's dietary habits and other disease affected rate, the KNN algorithm is used to classify and identify the person's death rate. Using clustering and classification algorithms in a combined way, an accuracy of 79% is achieved. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The relationship of land tenure, land use and land cover changes in Lake Victoria basin

Water basins characterise both physical and social environmental aspects such as land tenure. As such, the basins extend beyond spatial units of physical resources and human relations analysis to policy research and reform units. The comprehensive view of water basins in research goes along with an observed increase in anthropogenic-driven changes, such as land use and land cover changes, and cases of ineffective remedial measures to the adverse change, such as through applying integrated watershed management approaches. The human-induced land cover changes affect the water basin's biodiversity, for instance, contributing to an increase in zoonotic disease outbreaks like coronaviruses. The Lake Victoria basin exhibits similar patterns of change and effects due to, among other factors, land tenure, whose contribution is less known empirically. Therefore, this paper integrates satellite imagery and catchment survey data to examine the relationship between land tenure and land uses and land cover changes in the Lake Victoria basin of Eastern Africa. Additionally, explore the contextual character and role of three land tenure systems of Customary, Native freehold and Mailo found in the Uganda country segment of the basin in explaining the outcomes. The aim is to provide information that, among other benefits, improves water basin management and governance. The results indicate a statistically significant relationship exists between the perceived extent of land use and land cover change;drivers of change;the extent of adopting sustainable land-use practices, and the prevailing land tenure. Though with different tenure systems, the three case study water catchments experienced adverse land use and cover changes. The changes mainly affected land tenure indicative land use and cover classes, prominently on the Customary, Mailo, and Native freehold land tenure systems. However, marginal differences occur among the land tenure systems, as the systems feature both de jure and de facto systems and an orientation towards customary tenure characters. The situation likely explains the observed closeness in perceptions regarding the role and relationship between land tenure and land use and cover changes, tenure systems character, perceived drivers of change and eventual outcomes, including the sustainable land use practices adoption. In addition to explaining the land use and cover change, land tenure is an essential tool for restoration and sustainable basin development and sustainability. We, thus, recommend land tenure responsiveness in water basin management approaches for sustainable societal development. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Simulation-based optimisation: analysis of the emergency department resources under COVID-19 conditions

The emergency department (ED) is the most important section in every hospital. The ED behaviour is adequately complex, because the ED has several uncertain parameters such as the waiting time of patients or arrival time of patients. To deal with ED complexities, this paper presents a simulation-based optimisation-based meta-model (S-BO-BM-M) to minimise total waiting time of the arriving patients in an emergency department under COVID-19 conditions. A full-factorial design used meta-modelling approach to identify scenarios of systems to estimate an integer nonlinear programming model for the patient waiting time minimisation under COVID-19 conditions. Findings showed that the S-BO-BM-M obtains the new key resources configuration. Simulation-based optimisation meta-modelling approach in this paper is an invaluable contribution to the ED and medical managers for the redesign and evaluates of current situation ED system to reduce waiting time of patients and improve resource distribution in the ED under COVID-19 conditions to improve efficiency. Copyright © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Current Technologies for Detection of COVID-19: Biosensors, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): Review

Despite the fact that COVID-19 is no longer a global pandemic due to development and integration of different technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of the disease, technological advancement in the field of molecular biology, electronics, computer science, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, nanotechnology, etc. has led to the development of molecular approaches and computer aided diagnosis for the detection of COVID-19. This study provides a holistic approach on COVID-19 detection based on (1) molecular diagnosis which includes RT-PCR, antigen–antibody, and CRISPR-based biosensors and (2) computer aided detection based on AI-driven models which include deep learning and transfer learning approach. The review also provide comparison between these two emerging technologies and open research issues for the development of smart-IoMT-enabled platforms for the detection of COVID-19. © 2022 by the authors.

Assessing climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and agricultural innovation systems in the Niger Delta

Climate change and its impacts on agriculture have been widely discussed at national and global levels. An important aspect of the discussion has been adaptation/mitigation approaches. Consequently, several strategies have been suggested as measures to ensure agriculture remains productively profitable. However, food security especially in critical times, such as the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be a challenge even for regions naturally endowed for agriculture. The study evaluated research recommended strategies, and further examined the innovativeness of the strategies in fostering sustainable agricultural innovation system (AIS) in the Niger Delta. The study relied on both secondary and primary data;analysed 129 previous studies and gathered responses from 282 extension agents. The study introduces a method for assessing the innovativeness of strategies by calculating their rated values on five traits. Findings revealed the issues and implications of adopting most recommended strategies and the place of most strategies in fostering AIS. The study highlights the possible reasons why farmers fail to adopt most strategies as suggested by studies on climate change in the region. Based on the findings, recommendations were made on the way forward. The study adds to the scanty discussion of climate change and AIS at regional levels, particularly in the climate change prone and oil rich Niger Delta region. The study offers a novel approach for scoring innovations in agriculture. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Student innovation capability in virtual team projects: lessons learnt from COVID-19 pandemic era

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine students' innovation capability in virtual team projects from the COVID-19 pandemic era. Design/methodology/approach: The researchers conducted an empirical study and the data were collected from a total of 308 participants engaging in virtual team projects. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to assess the relationship of the conceptual framework. Findings: The findings showed that virtual team culture positively influenced propensity to innovate. Also, knowledge management and communication influenced propensity to innovate through the mediation of support for innovation. Practical implications: Developing a strategy for propensity to innovate in any organization demands that project team members should be able to seamlessly communicate. Developing knowledge management, communication and support for innovation strategy in a virtual team may prepare an organization for permanently different post-pandemic events and the future turbulent business environment. Originality/value: This study highlights innovation capability for the propensity to innovate, a topic that is not widely researched, especially in the context of virtual teams. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.