Optimized synthesis of anti-COVID-19 drugs aided by retrosynthesis software

Considering the millions of COVID-19 patients worldwide, a global critical challenge of low-cost and efficient anti-COVID-19 drug production has emerged. Favipiravir is one of the potential anti-COVID-19 drugs, but its original synthetic route with 7 harsh steps gives a low product yield (0.8%) and has a high cost ($68 per g). Herein, we demonstrated a low-cost and efficient synthesis route for favipiravir designed using improved retrosynthesis software, which involves only 3 steps under safe and near-ambient air conditions. A yield of 32% and cost of $1.54 per g were achieved by this synthetic route. We also used the same strategy to optimize the synthesis of sabizabulin. We anticipate that these synthetic routes will contribute to the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

Reducing farmers' poverty vulnerability in China: The role of digital financial inclusion

This paper applies exogenous shocks to investigate the impact of digital financial inclusion (DFI) on farmers' poverty vulnerability in China. We find that farmers in highly developed DFI areas are less vulnerable to the poverty trap. The result is robust to various checks, including propensity score matching and difference-in-differences method and the instrumental variable approach. Moreover, we find that income diversification is the possible economic channel through which DFI affects farmers' poverty vulnerability. Further analyses show that DFI has a "targeting” effect on those who are poor and vulnerable, and a synergistic effect by working with medical insurance and informal finance in terms of reducing farmers' poverty vulnerability. Our research findings provide new theoretical insights and useful guidance in enhancing financial inclusiveness and sustainable development in the post-COVID-19 era. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Research on Recognition and Analysis of Teacher–Student Behavior Based on a Blended Synchronous Classroom

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, many students are unable to attend face-to-face courses, Therefore, in this case, distance education should be promoted to replace face-to-face education. However, because of the imbalance of education in different regions, such as the imbalance of education resources between rural and urban areas, the quality of distance education may not be guaranteed. Therefore, in China and some regions, there have been efforts made to carry out blended synchronous classroom attempts. In hybrid synchronous classroom situations, teachers' workloads have increased, and it is difficult to fully understand students' learning efficiency and class participation. We use deep learning to identify the behaviors of teachers and students in a blended synchronous classroom-based situation, aiming to automate the analysis of classroom videos, which can help teachers in classroom reflection and summary in a blended synchronous classroom or face-to-face classroom. In the behavior recognition of students and teachers, we combine the head, hand, and body posture information of teachers and students and add the feature pyramid (FPN) and convolutional block attention module (CBAM) for comparative experiments. Finally, S–T (student–teacher) analysis and engagement analysis were carried out on the identification results. © 2023 by the authors.

Identifying Empathic Opportunities During Care Planning Discussions with Chinese Patients with Advanced Cancer and Their Caregivers (Sch434)

Outcomes: 1. Describe unique barriers that Chinese North American patients with advanced cancer face in expressing emotions and discussing future planning. 2. Identify empathic opportunities (ie, topics associated with emotional expression) during care planning discussions with Chinese North American patients. Introduction: Recognizing emotions in intercultural contexts represents a core competency in palliative care. Yet, a paucity of literature describes the types, patterns, and contexts of patient-expressed emotions during high-stakes conversations with patients from linguistically marginalized communities. We sought to address this gap by analyzing the emotional content during care planning conversations with Chinese patients with advanced cancer and their caregivers. Method(s): We conducted a secondary analysis of 22 semistructured interviews of Chinese patients (n=20) with metastatic cancer and their caregivers (n=8) recruited at one American comprehensive cancer centre. Informed by the Empathic Communication Coding System and existing literature, we conducted template analysis to code the transcripts for patients' and caregivers' expressed emotions. We also thematically analyzed the patterns and contexts in which emotions arose. Result(s): Participants were middle-aged (55.6+/-13.5 years), born in China (89.3%), 60.7% female, 85.7% partnered/married, and 89.3% college educated. Most of the interviews were conducted with patients alone (72.7%). Happiness was the most prevalent emotion (62%) followed by gratitude (43%), fear (43%), sadness (38%), anger (14%), surprise (14%), and humour (5%). When a caregiver was present, the interviews trended toward lower frequency of emotional expression. Regarding intensity, only one instance (anger) was categorized as most severe. Regarding context, emotions were only expressed in discussions about the past or present. Specifically, participants expressed positive emotions when discussing clinician attributes, symptom relief, and immigration to North America. Participants expressed negative emotions when discussing burdensome symptoms, diagnostic journey, the COVID-19 pandemic, and experiences with linguistic or cultural discordance. Discussion(s): Emotional expression during high-stakes care planning conversations with Chinese patients and caregivers may be infrequent and grounded in social, topical, and temporal context. Future work is necessary to understand how clinicians could best respond to distressing emotions during naturally occurring palliative care conversations with Chinese patients and their caregivers.Copyright © 2023

A dynamic key node learning algorithm in evolving financial network: case study during the period of coronavirus

Finding an influential set of nodes in the interconnected network, whose activities would maximally influence the development of overall network, is a fundamental topic in finance, biology, social science, epidemic control and other scenarios with respect to network science. In recent years, some works are proposed to find key nodes via network connectivity measures, these studies assume a static environment, and besides, key nodes are calculated through pairwise connectivity, the number of connected components and other measures from the perspective of graph theory. However, these studies leave out of consideration on the dynamic evolving environment and causal relationships in the network. In this paper, we introduce a key node learning algorithm in an evolving financial network. The intuition of the algorithm is to model the causality of financial entities over the time, and the metrics for cascading networks are proposed to grade the entities in the network. In the experiment, the worldwide financial activities before and during the period of coronavirus are analyzed. The proposed metrics can effectively capture the influential entities and quantitatively describe these influences on the whole financial system. © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

MLFW: A Database for Face Recognition on Masked Faces

As more and more people begin to wear masks due to current COVID-19 pandemic, existing face recognition systems may encounter severe performance degradation when recognizing masked faces. To figure out the impact of masks on face recognition model, we build a simple but effective tool to generate masked faces from unmasked faces automatically, and construct a new database called Masked LFW (MLFW) based on Cross-Age LFW (CALFW) database. The mask on the masked face generated by our method has good visual consistency with the original face. Moreover, we collect various mask templates, covering most of the common styles appeared in the daily life, to achieve diverse generation effects. Considering realistic scenarios, we design three kinds of combinations of face pairs. The recognition accuracy of SOTA models declines 5%–16% on MLFW database compared with the accuracy on the original images. MLFW database can be viewed and downloaded at http://whdeng.cn/mlfw. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Energy-Efficient Monitoring of Potential Side Effects from COVID-19 Vaccines

COVID-19 has affected the world for almost two years causing lots of damages and losses of lives. With the development of sensing technology and digital health, recent research studies suggest to use wearable devices for monitoring COVID-19 symptoms or analyzing people's behaviour change. As COVID-19 vaccines are getting widely available, their side effects have raised public concerns, though have not yet been thoroughly studied due to the short deployment time. As far as we know, this work is the first study to use wearable devices and mobile app to collect physiological data to explore potential side effects to human bodies from COVID-19 vaccinations. We designed and developed a mobile sensing system, which can monitor changes of physiological indicators through wearable devices, collect self-reported data from the users and proposed a green data transmission mechanism which can reduce the communication overheads. Pilot study has been conducted to evaluate the feasibility of our system. Preliminary results show that increased resting heart rate (RHR) and changes on average heart rate (HR) are observed in some participants after COVID-19 vaccinations. This study opens up the opportunity to collect larger amount of data and further investigate potential side effects from COVID-19 vaccinations. © 2022 IEEE.

Suppress the aerosol generation from the air turbine handpiece in dental clinics

The COVID-19 pandemic imposes a severe challenge to the health care providers and patients in dental clinics as the dental procedures produce abundant airborne materials. Although dental practices use a multi-layered protective procedure to reduce the potential danger from dental aerosols, it is still beneficial to suppress the aerosol generation from the origin as much as possible. Reducing the aerosol generation (especially the droplets of smaller diameters) from the very beginning will ease the burden on all subsequent layers of protection. In this work, we first provide a relatively complete picture of the structure of the spray produced by the air turbine handpiece. We found that the spray consists of two domains: one is the canopy shaped centrifugal zone and the other is a dense ballistic spray core. The droplets from the centrifugal zone are much smaller than those of the spray core and, hence, are more prone to stay in the air. The location of the centrifugal zone also makes it more challenging to be contained by the mouth or rubber dam. To suppress the atomization of the centrifugal zone, we used the food-additive carboxymethylcellulose sodium (CMC-Na) water solutions of different concentrations. The data show that the viscoelastic property of the 0.5 wt. % CMC-Na water solution can effectively suppress the aerosol generation of the centrifugal zone. (C) 2022 Author(s).

Protecting healthcare workers against COVID-19: A fast-track ventilation system for hospitals

Clinical problem: The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) puts the healthcare workers (HCWs) at a high risk of infection. So many aerosol-generating medical procedures, including endotracheal intubation, non-invasive ventilation, and exhaled air dispersion, exacerbate the exponential infection rate as COVID-19 is highly infective and primarily transmitted through aerosols, especially when medical care systems have been overwhelmed by the COVID-19 surge, resulting from the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), hospital wards, and negative pressure rooms. Hence, we develop an ultra-fast-track and effective technology utilizing vented enclosures for individual patients to protect HCWs. The concept of innovation and how it works: We aim to minimize the airborne cross-infection risk in hospitals by limiting the spread of virus and decreasing the encounters between infected patients and HCWs to effectively protect the HCWs by reducing small droplets and aerosol emission from patients. Our system mainly consists of transparent hood, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes, pump, filter, and antiviral materials. When negative pressure is introduced by the pump, the suction at several extraction ports is induced. The contaminated air is conveyed through an exit port at the base of the hood. The extracted contaminated air is cleaned by high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters and UVC light, and then released back into the ward. Besides, the hood is coated by anti-viral and anti-bacterial coating. Feasibility and usability for clinical application: (1) Quickly assembled in 5 min: our system can solve the urgent demand when the healthcare system is overwhelmed. (2) Excellent performance: almost 100% aerosol removal efficiency validated by simulations, experiments, and trials in local hospitals. (3) Achieve 26 air changes per hour (ACH) while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA) suggests a minimum ACH of 12: our system can provide sufficient air for individual patients in the hood. (4) Highly adjustable, flexible, portable, and low-cost. Scalability and sustainability: Our frame is constructed from PVC materials, which can be readily purchased and manufactured. Our system is highly adjustable, flexible, portable and low-cost, indicating that it can be installed or removed easily in hospitals wards, intensive care unit (ICU), hospital waiting rooms, and clinics without modifying the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

REAL-TIME MASKED FACE REVEALING FOR VIDEO CONFERENCE

Video conferencing is an essential way for contactless conversation, which conveys abundant multimedia signals. Especially under COVID-19, the video conference has been becoming a common way for daily communications. However, for the sake of plague prevention, it usually happens that the people attending the video conference are wearing a mouth mask, leading to inconvenient communication due to incomplete facial information. To tackle this problem, we develop a novel system that reveals the masked faces in real-time, making each participant feel like the others are mask-free. Moreover, we map the audio to 3DMM expression to guide the generation of various mouth shapes utilizing multi-modal information. Extensive experiments validate the revealing effectiveness and better user experience of the system. Furthermore, by applying lightweight networks design, the proposed system can run in real-time. © 2021 IEEE

Effects of regulatory focus on online learning engagement of high school students: The mediating role of self-efficacy and academic emotions

Background Since the outbreak of COVID-19, online courses have been extensively used from K-12 to higher education. Online learning engagement, an important factor in online learning success, is currently at a low level in high school. Meanwhile, the research on the factors that influence high school students' online learning engagement is still limited. Objectives Based on the theories of regulatory focus and value control, this study developed a multi-mediation model to investigate whether self-efficacy and academic emotions can mediate the relationship between regulatory focus and online learning engagement. Methods A total of 926 high school student (52.16% female, mean age = 16.47 years) were recruited to participate in this study and completed self-report measures of regulatory focus, online learning engagement, online learning self-efficacy and academic emotions. And we used SPSS macro PROCESS developed by Hayes to examine the mediating role of online learning self-efficacy and academic emotions. Results and Conclusions The results indicated that promotion focus had a stable positive effect on online learning engagement of high school students, whereas prevention focus had a significant negative effect on the same. Self-efficacy and positive emotions had a significant positive mediating effect between promotion focus and online learning engagement. Moreover, positive emotions had a significant positive mediating effect between the prevention focus and online learning engagement, while negative emotions had a significant negative mediating effect between them.

Optimal control strategy for COVID-19 concerning both life and economy based on deep reinforcement learning

At present, the global COVID-19 is still severe. More and more countries have experienced second or even third outbreaks. The epidemic is far from over until the vaccine is successfully developed and put on the market on a large scale. Inappropriate epidemic control strategies may bring catastrophic consequences. It is essential to maximize the epidemic restraining and to mitigate economic damage. However, the study on the optimal control strategy concerning both sides is rare, and no optimal model has been built. In this paper, the Susceptible-Infectious-Hospitalized-Recovered (SIHR) compartment model is expanded to simulate the epidemic's spread concerning isolation rate. An economic model affected by epidemic isolation measures is established. The effective reproduction number and the eigenvalues at the equilibrium point are introduced as the indicators of controllability and stability of the model and verified the effectiveness of the SIHR model. Based on the Deep Q Network (DQN), one of the deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods, the blocking policy is studied to maximize the economic output under the premise of controlling the number of infections in different stages. The epidemic control strategies given by deep RL under different learning strategies are compared for different reward coefficients. The study demonstrates that optimal policies may differ in various countries depending on disease spread and anti-economic risk ability. The results show that the more economical strategy, the less economic loss in the short term, which can save economically fragile countries from economic crises. In the second or third outbreak stage, the earlier the government adopts the control strategy, the smaller the economic loss. We recommend the method of deep RL to specify a policy which can control the epidemic while making quarantine economically viable.

Self protective behavior patterns and influencing factors of Chinese residents during the COVID-19 epidemic

Objective To analyze Chinese residents′ behavior characteristics in regards to wearing masks, washing their hands upon returning home, avoiding unnecessary leaving home and reducing unnecessary parties during the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. To investigate the demographic differences and influential factors of the above four individual protective behaviors, and to provide scientific basis for epidemic prevention and control.  Methods  A total of 4 123 Chinese residents aged 18 years and over were selected from the 2020 COVID-19 Prevention and Control and Its Impact Survey. The Chi-square test was used to examine the differences in the four behaviors among different demographic groups, and multiple Logistic regression analysis models were used to analyze the factors of the four behaviors.  Results  The percentage of practicing the above four individual protective behaviors was very high, which were 96.09%, 94.66%, 91.12%, 95.22%, respectively. Meanwhile, there were significant difference among different groups. Multivariate Logistic analysis showed that the analysis main factors affecting wearing masks were gender (OR=2.40, P < 0.001), urban or rural area (OR=0.48, P < 0.001), whether in Wuhan (OR=0.27, P=0.001;OR=0.13, P < 0.001);for washing their hands upon returning home the factors were gender (OR=2.18, P < 0.001), group age (OR=3.14, P < 0.001;OR=8.29, P < 0.001;OR=4.69, P < 0.001), urban or rural area (OR=0.73, P=0.050), education level (OR=1.53, P=0.059;OR=2.35, P < 0.001), whether in Wuhan (OR=0.70, P=0.089);for avoiding unnecessary leaving home the factors were gender (OR=2.05, P < 0.001), group age (OR=2.77, P < 0.001;OR=3.30, P < 0.001;OR=5.43, P < 0.001), urban or rural area (OR=1.64, P=0.001), education level (OR=1.50, P=0.026), whether in Wuhan (OR=0.73, P=0.056;OR=0.63, P=0.002);and for reducing unnecessary parties the factors were gender (OR=1.97, P < 0.001), group age (OR=2.94, P < 0.001;OR=3.00, P=0.002;OR=3.33, P=0.003), education level (OR=0.52, P=0.032;OR=0.61, P=0.097), whether in Wuhan (OR=0.69, P=0.094;OR=0.58, P=0.006).  Conclusions  During the COVID-19 epidemic, Chinese residents did a good job in personal protection. But there were still group differences. So, the formulation of relevant policies and personal protection publicity should be varied based on specific groups of people and specific areas. © 2021, Publication Centre of Anhui Medical University. All rights reserved.

Immune correlates analysis of the mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine efficacy clinical trial

[Figure: see text].

College Students' Perception of Mega-event and Its Influence on Their Travel Motivation Based on SPSS: Take China' s lease of giant pandas to Finland as an example

This study uses questionnaire survey to take the case of China leasing giant pandas to Finland as an example, the data obtained is put into the computer software SPSS 16.0, to explore college students' perception of the impact of diplomatic events by factor analysis, and finds that college students' positive perceptions of diplomatic events are higher than negative perceptions. The "enhance international relations and image"factor is the strongest, and through linear regression analysis, it is concluded that the "stabilize the market economy"factor in the positive dimension will have a significant positive impact on travel motivation. Accordingly, relevant opinions on the diplomatic events and development of outbound tourism after the COVID-19 epidemic has under control are put forward. This study consolidated the application of spss16.0 computer software in the field of social sciences. © 2021 ACM.

Risk perception characteristics and influencing factors of frontline medical staff during the coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic

Objective To explore the risk perception characteristics and influencing factors of frontline medical staff during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, so as to provide effective reference for correctly perceiving the risk, improving stress-coping skills and maintaining mental health during the high-risk and high-intensity combat against the COVID-19 epidemic. Methods A risk perception questionnaire based on the context of COVID-19 epidemic was used to investigate the risk perception level of 181 frontline medical staff fighting against COVID-19 epidemic. Nonparametric test was used to compare the demographic factors and risk perception dimensions. Logistic regression analysis was used to predict the effect of demographic factors on the risk perception level of frontline medical staff. Results During the COVID-19 epidemic, the overall risk perception score of the frontline medical staff was 36.39±8.59, and the scoring rate was 60.65%. The top three dimensions with the highest scoring rate were physical function risk, organization risk and personal safety risk. The score of frontline medical staff in Hubei province was higher than that outside Hubei province (Z=-2.180, P<0.05) and the score of medical technicians (doctors and technicians) was higher than that of nurses (Z=-3.039, P<0.01). The location of frontline medical staff could significantly predict the overall risk perception (P<0.05). Conclusion During the COVID-19 epidemic, the risk perception of frontline medical staff has been found at the medium level, with the risk perception degree of frontline medical staff in Hubei province being higher than that outside Hubei province and the risk perception degree of medical technicians being higher than that of nurses. The location of frontline medical staff can predict their risk perception.

Clinical features of 2019 novel coronavirus infection, family prevention and control in children

With the outbreak and spread of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV, or SARS-CoV-2) infection in Wuhan, China, the number of children infected has also increased significantly, and even severe and critically ill children have appeared. In order to curb the spread of the epidemic, it is important to understand the clinical manifestations of 2019-nCoV infection in children and strengthen the key points for family prevention and control. According to the diagnostic standards and protective measures issued by the National Health Commission, this article summarizes the epidemiological characteristics and clinical manifestations of some child cases, and proposes to focus on the clinical manifestations, treatment procedures, and family protection and daily health care. © 2020, Editorial Board of Medical Journal of Wuhan University. All right reserved.

An emergency strategy for intensive care unit during COVID-19 outbreak in Chongqing, China.

OBJECTIVE: Since December 2019, a novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) broke out in Wuhan, China, which has rapidly spread from China to at least 200 countries abroad. COVID-19 was issued a global outbreak and pandemic by the World Health Organization with more than 3 million confirmed cases by May 31, 2020. So far more than ten thousand severe and critically ill patients and hospital-related infection with COVID-19 have been reported with more than four thousand deaths in China. There is a great challenge for intensive care units (ICUs) in hospitals. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The comment mainly focused on admission and discharge criteria, therapy protocol, prevention and control strategies for ICU during COVID-19 outbreak. The emergency strategy for ICU will be helpful for prevention and control of COVID-19 and treatment of critically ill patients with COVID-19. CONCLUSIONS: Progress in the management of ICU is crucial for a decrease in the mortality of critically ill patients with COVID-19 with the clinical evidence and experience updated.