A digital transformation-enabled framework and strategies for public health risk response and governance: China's experience

Purpose: Under uncertain circumstances, digital technologies are taken as digital transformation enablers and driving forces to integrate with medical, healthcare and emergency management research for effective epidemic prevention and control. This study aims to adapt complex systems in emergency management. Thus, a digital transformation-driven and systematic circulation framework is proposed in this study that can utilize the advantages of digital technologies to generate innovative and systematic governance. Design/methodology/approach: Aiming at adapting complex systems in emergency management, a systematic circulation framework based on the interpretive research is proposed in this study that can utilize the advantages of digital technologies to generate innovative and systematic governance. The framework consists of four phases: (1) analysis of emergency management stages, (2) risk identification in the emergency management stages, (3) digital-enabled response model design for emergency management, and (4) strategy generation for digital emergency governance. A case study in China was illustrated in this study. Findings: This paper examines the role those digital technologies can play in responding to pandemics and outlines a framework based on four phases of digital technologies for pandemic responses. After the phase-by-phase analysis, a digital technology-enabled emergency management framework, titled "Expected digital-enabled emergency management framework (EDEM framework)” was adapted and proposed. Moreover, the social risks of emergency management phases are identified. Then, three strategies for emergency governance and digital governance from the three perspectives, namely "Strengthening weaknesses for emergency response,” "Enhancing integration for collaborative governance,” and "Engaging foundations for emergency management” that the government can adopt them in the future, fight for public health emergency events. Originality/value: The novel digital transformation-driven systematic circulation framework for public health risk response and governance was proposed. Meanwhile, an "Expected digital-enabled emergency management framework (EDEM model)” was also proposed to achieve a more effective empirical response for public health risk response and governance and contribute to studies about the government facing the COVID-19 pandemic effectively. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Measures to Ensure the Sustainability of Information Systems in the COVID-19 Environment

National defense requires uninterrupted decision-making, even under direct or indirect impacts of non-traditional threats such as infectious diseases. Since all work utilizes information systems, it is very important to ensure the sustainability and availability of information systems. In particular, in terms of security management, defense work is being performed by dividing the network into a national defense network and a commercial Internet network. This study suggests a work execution plan for sustainability that takes into account the efficiency of work performed on the Internet and the effectiveness of security through effective defense information system operation. It is necessary to minimize the network contact points between the national defense network and the commercial Internet and to select high-priority tasks from various tasks and operate them efficiently. For this purpose, actual cases were investigated for an institution, "Organization A”, and characteristics were presented. Through the targeted tasks and operation plans presented in this paper to improve the effectiveness of defense tasks and ensure security, it will be possible to increase the sustainability and availability of task performance even under non-traditional threats such as infectious diseases. © 2022 by the authors.

Distributed denial of service attack prediction: Challenges, open issues and opportunities

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one of the biggest cyber threats. DDoS attacks have evolved in quantity and volume to evade detection and increase damage. Changes during the COVID-19 pandemic have left traditional perimeter-based security measures vulnerable to attackers that have diversified their activities by targeting health services, e-commerce, and educational services. DDoS attack prediction searches for signals of attack preparation to warn about the imminence of the attack. Prediction is necessary to handle high-volumetric DDoS attacks and to increase the time to defend against them. This survey article presents the classification of studies from the literature comprising the current state-of-the-art on DDoS attack prediction. It highlights the results of this extensive literature review categorizing the works by prediction time, architecture, employed methodology, and the type of data utilized to predict attacks. Further, this survey details each identified study and, finally, it emphasizes the research opportunities to evolve the DDoS attack prediction state-of-the-art.

Military Response to Medical Crises-Consensus Recommendations for Military-Civilian Transitions of Care.

OBJECTIVE: The threat that New York faced in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, prompted an unprecedented response. The US military deployed active-duty medical professionals and equipment to NYC in a first of its kind response to a "medical" domestic disaster. Transitions of care for patients surfaced as a key challenge. Uniformed Services University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hosted a consensus conference of civilian and military healthcare professionals to identify care transition best practices for future military-civilian responses. METHODS: We performed individual interviews followed by a modified Delphi technique during a two-day virtual conference. Patient transitions of care emerged as a key theme from pre-conference interviews. Twelve participants attended the two-day virtual conference and generated best practice recommendations from an iterative process. RESULTS: Participants identified 19 recommendations in 10 "sub-themes" related to patient transitions of care: needs assessment and capability analysis; unified command; equipment; patient handoffs; role of in-person facilitation; dynamic updates; patient selection; patient tracking; daily operations; and resource typing. CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an unprecedented military response. This study created 19 consensus recommendations for care transitions between military and civilian healthcare assets that may be useful in future military-civilian medical engagements.

On epidemiology as racial-capitalist (re)colonization and epistemic violence

This commentary reflects upon power-knowledge dynamics and matters of epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice that undergird epidemiological knowledge production related to racial health inequities in the U.S. Grounded in Foucault's power-knowledge concepts-"objects", "ritual", and "the privileged"-and guided by Black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson's conceptualization of epistemic violence, it critiques the dominant positivist, reductionist, and extractivist paradigm of epidemiology, interrogating the settler-colonial and racial-capitalist nature of the knowledge production/curation enterprise. The commentary challenges epidemiology's affinity for epistemological, procedural, and methodological norms that effectively silence/erase community knowledge(s) and nuance in favor of reductionist empirical representations/re-presentations produced by researchers who, often, have never stepped foot inside the communities they aver to model. It also expressly names the structurally racist reality of a "colorblind" knowledge production/curation system controlled by White scholars working from/for an invisibilized White scientific gaze. In this spirit, this commentary engages the public health critical race praxis principle of "disciplinary self-critique", illuminating the inherent contradictions of a racial health equity discourse that fails to interrogate the racialized power dynamics underlying its knowledge production enterprise. In doing so, this commentary seeks to (re)frame and invite discourse regarding matters of epistemic violence and (re)colonization as manifest/legible within epidemiology research, suggesting that the structural racism embedded within-and perpetuated through-our collective work must be addressed to advance antiracist and decolonial public health futures. In this regard, I suggest the value of engaging poetry as praxis-as mode of knowledge production/expression to "center the margins" and offer counternarratives to epidemiology's epistemic violence. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Learning the lessons of COVID-19: homeland resilience in the United Kingdom - is it now time for both a dedicated civil defense organization and a paramilitary force?

The United Kingdom's homeland resilience capacity is poor. The COVID-19 pandemic proved this. Back in 2019, the UK had been labeled as the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic. And yet, by 2020, and once COVID-19 had struck, the UK became "unequivocally” the hardest hit country in Europe – particularly in terms of excess mortality. In this article it is argued that the UK's continental neighbors coped better than the UK because they had better homeland resilience capacity. This was provided by their having civil defense organizations, paramilitary forces and militaries which are specifically designed to contribute to homeland emergencies. The UK, in contrast and almost uniquely in the world, lacks both civil defense and paramilitary bodies and, moreover, it has armed forces that are not actually structured to provide help in domestic emergencies. Given the problems highlighted during COVID-19, is it now time for the UK to set up its own bodies specifically tasked with alleviating domestic emergencies? This article explores this question by comparing the UK's pandemic response with that of Spain – a country which, according to all available data, should have performed worse than the UK. But it did not. Why?

Perceptions, knowledge and self-defense behaviors regarding COVID-19 among employees at Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi, Thailand

Purpose - This research aims to study self-defense behaviors from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and to investigate factors affecting the prevention and control behavior of COVID-19 among personnel at Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi. Design/methodology/approach - The sample was 405 personnel of Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi. The sample was calculated by using the Yamane formula at a confidence level of 95. The researcher collected the data between July 1 and 15, 2020. Questionnaire items were developed following the health belief model (HBM). The questionnaire contains basic information, knowledge of COVID-19, perception of COVID-19 and COVID-19 preventive behaviors. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, correlation coefficients and multiple regression analysis at the statistical significance level of 0.05. Findings - The results showed that the sample had an average knowledge about COVID-19 of 8.93, the perceived of risk and severity of COVID-19 was presented average of 4.22 and 3.48. The perceived of benefits and barriers of COVID-19 showed average of 4.31 and 2.72 and mean of COVID-19 prevention and control behaviors was 2.41. The multiple regression analysis showed that the model can explain the various self-defense behaviors from COVID-19 of 11.30%. Perception of the benefits of COVID-19 had a statistically significant effect on self-defense behaviors from COVID-19 at the level 0.05 (Beta = 0.232, 95% CI: 1.233-3.395, p < 0.001). Originality/value - Based on the results, the relationship between HBM and COVID-19 prevention behavior can be clearly seen. This study found the perception of benefit toward COVID-19 affected prevention practice. Thus, using HBM could be useful in improving preventive behaviors of COVID-19.

Physical-Chemical Regulation of Membrane Receptors Dynamics in Viral Invasion and Immune Defense.

Mechanical cues dynamically regulate membrane receptors functions to trigger various physiological and pathological processes from viral invasion to immune defense. These cues mainly include various types of dynamic mechanical forces and the spatial confinement of plasma membrane. However, the molecular mechanisms of how they couple with biochemical cues in regulating membrane receptors functions still remain mysterious. Here, we review recent advances in methodologies of single-molecule biomechanical techniques and in novel biomechanical regulatory mechanisms of critical ligand recognition of viral and immune receptors including SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, T cell receptor (TCR) and other co-stimulatory immune receptors. Furthermore, we provide our perspectives of the general principle of how force-dependent kinetics determine the dynamic functions of membrane receptors and of biomechanical-mechanism-driven SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody design and TCR engineering for T-cell-based therapies.