Clinical Characteristics and Blood Test Results in COVID-19 Patients

Objective. An outbreak of pneumonia named COVID-19 caused by a novel coronavirus in Wuhan is rapidly spreading worldwide. The objective of the present study was to clarify further the clinical characteristics and blood parameters in COVID-19 patients. Materials and Methods. Twenty-three suspected patients and 64 patients with laboratory-confirmed SARS-Cov-2 infection were admitted to a designated hospital. Epidemiological, clinical, laboratory, and treatment data were collected and analyzed. Results. Of the 64 patients studied, 47 (73.4%) had been exposed to a confirmed source of COVID-19 transmission. On admission, the most common symptoms were fever (75%) and cough (76.6%). Twenty-eight (43.8%) COVID-19 patients showed leukopenia, 10 (15.6%) showed lymphopenia, 47 (73.4%) and 41 (64.1%) had elevated high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), respectively, and 30 (46.9%) had increased fibrinogen concentration. After the treatment, the counts of white blood cells and platelets, and the level of prealbumin increased significantly, while aspartate aminotransferase (AST), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), and hsCRP decreased. COVID-19 patients with the hospital stay longer than 12 days had higher body mass index (BMI) and increased levels of AST, LDH, fibrinogen, hsCRP, and ESR. Conclusions. Results of blood tests have potential clinical value in COVID-19 patients.Copyright © 2020 by the Association of Clinical Scientists, Inc.

Air quality improvement assessment and exposure risk of Shandong Province in China during 2014 to 2020.

As one of the most polluted provinces in China, air pollution events occur frequently in Shandong. Based on the hourly (or daily) concentrations of six air pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, SO2 and CO), the situations of air quality improvement in three kinds of cities (key cities, coastal cities and general cities) are assessed comprehensively during 2014-2020. Contrary to the daily maximum 8-h average ozone (MDA8 O3), the annual average concentrations of other pollutants show the downward trends during 2014-2020. Therein, the improvement rates of annual average concentrations of air pollutants in key cities are highest. By 2020, the day proportions of O3 as the primary pollutant are up to 38% in three kinds of cities. Besides, due to the impact of COVID-19, the monthly average concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2 and CO in February 2020 decrease by 32.1-49.5% year-on-year. There are still about 50% of population exposed to high-risk regions (R i > 2), which are mainly concentrated in main urban areas and industrial areas. Thus, the adjustment of industrial structure and energy composition in the context of carbon peak and carbon neutrality should be implemented in the future. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13762-022-04651-5.

Dynamic volatility connectedness among cryptocurrencies and China's financial assets in standard times and during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this paper, we use the time-varying parameter vector autoregressions (TVP-VAR) model to examine volatility connectedness among 5 cryptocurrencies and 5 China's financial assets in static and dynamic scenarios. We find that the dynamic total connectedness of the system exhibits large dynamic variability. When the total connectedness breaks through 50%, it will move down rapidly. Ethereum and Litecoin are increasing their influence, whereas Bitcoin is losing its leadership. The impact of the cryptocurrency market on China's financial market has become very small since 2022Q1. Furthermore, the COVID-19 outbreak has a long-term (short-term) impact on the gold market (the other markets).

A Data-Driven Proactive Scheduling Approach for Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic brought a great challenge to manufacturing industry, especially for some fraditional and unstable manufacturing systems. It reminds us that intelligent manufacturing certainly will play a key role in the future. Dynamic shop scheduling is also an inevitable hot topic in intelligent manufacturing. However, fraditional dynamic scheduling is a kind ofpassive scheduling mode which takes measures to adjust disturbed scheduling processes after the occurrence of dynamic events. It is difficult to ensure the stability of production because of lack of proactivity. To overcome these shortcomings, manufacturing big data and data technologies as the core driving force of intelligent manufacturing will be used to guide production. Thus, a datadriven proactive scheduling approach is proposed to deal with the dynamic events, especially for machine breakdown. In this paper, the overall procedure of the proposed approach is introduced. More specifically, we first use collected manufacturing data to predict the occurrence of machine breakdowns and provide reliable input for dynamic scheduling. Then a proactive scheduling model is constructed for the hybrid flow shop problem, and an intelligent optimization algorithm is used to solve the problem to realize proactive scheduling. Finally, we design comparative experiments with two fraditional rescheduling strategies to verify the effectiveness and stability of the proposed approach.

GloVe-CNN-BiLSTM Model for Sentiment Analysis on Text Reviews

Nowadays, social media networks generate a tremendous amount of social information from their users. To understand people's views and sentimental tendencies on a commodity or an event timely, it is necessary to conduct text sentiment analysis on the views expressed by users. For the microblog comment data, it is always mixed with long and short texts, which is relatively complex. Especially for long text data, it contains a lot of content, and the correlation between words is more complex than that in short text. To study the sentiment classification of these mixed texts composed of long-text and short-text, this research proposes an optimized GloVe-CNN-BiLSTM-based sentiment analysis model. In this model, GloVe is used to vectorize words, and CNN is given to represent part space character. BiLSTM is used to build temporal relationship. Twitter's comment data on COVID-19 is used as an experimental dataset. The results of the experiments suggest that this method can effectually identify the sentimental tendency of users' online comments, and the accuracy of sentiment classification on complete-text, long-text, and short-text can achieve to 0.9565, 0.9509, and 0.9560, respectively, which is obviously higher than other deep learning models. At the same time, experiments show that this method has good field expansion.

Exploring Older Adults' Adoption of We Chat Pay: A Cognitive Lock-In Perspective

Mobile payment has become increasingly popular worldwide, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, older adults have more difficulties in adapting to mobile payments than others. To understand the reasons behind this phenomenon, we explore cognitive lock-in and its antecedents in adopting WeChat Pay based on the status quo bias theory. We use the PLS-SEM technique with survey data from Chinese older adults over the age of 50. The results show that the cognitive lock-in of older adults is significantly affected by technology anxiety, habit, regret avoidance, and uncertainty costs. Moreover, older adults' intention to adopt WeChat Pay is positively associated with social influence and self-actualization, while cognitive lock-in is a significant negative determinant. This study can help us better understand the underlying mechanism behind older adults' adoption of mobile payment from a cognitive lock-in perspective. Furthermore, this study steers the discussion about improving older adults' digital literacy and optimizing age-appropriate services for mobile payments.

[COVID-19 vaccines primary features and research progress on possible trigger of liver injury post-vaccination].

The COVID-19 outbreak is a global pandemic that has had caused a profound impact on social stability, economic development and national security, and has further evolved into a major public health crisis. The rapid research and development and efficient deployment of vaccines is one of the effective means to prevent and control the epidemic. This article reviews the primary features of current COVID-19 vaccines, simultaneously focus the clinical features of liver injury post-vaccination and explore its possible pathogenesis.

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.

Development and challenges of mRNA-based therapeutics

mRNA-based drug has already become a focus as a potential new type of drug in recent years. With the rapidly evolving technologies, mRNA has been widely applied in various areas of clinical research, such as immune disease, oncological disease, infectious disease, and congenital metabolic disorder. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a great leap in mRNA vaccine development, forecasting that much more mRNA medicines will enter the market in the near future. In order to meet industrial requirements, this article provides an overview of the product profiles of mRNA-based drugs and their industrial landscape, and further discusses the key considerations in the manufacturing of such medicines. © 2021, Chinese Journal of New Drugs Co. Ltd. All right reserved.

A Robot Assisted High-flow Portable Cyclone Sampler for Bacterial and SARS-CoV-2 Aerosols

Airborne transmission of infectious diseases attracts great attention since the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there has been an intense dispute about aerosol transmission of the disease, which is largely due to lack of qualified instruments for studying the subject. Air sampling plays a critical role in all air pollution related study, and particularly critical for airborne pathogen detection. Here, we designed and evaluated a portable and high volume (400 L min-1) cyclone sampler named as Yao-CSpler using aerosolized Polystyrene (PS) uniform microspheres, Bacillus subtilis var. niger, Pseudomonas fluorescens, and both indoor and outdoor air particles. The experimental cutoff size of the Yao-CSpler was demonstrated to be 0.58 m (while the calculated theoretical value is 1.84 m), and the sampler has shown stable microbial collection performances for bacteria, fungi, and even viruses. The sampler had a physical collection efficiency of close 100% for particles of larger than 1 m. Jet-to-liquid distance and sampling duration were shown to substantially influence the sampler performance. Given the same sampling duration, the performances of the Yao-CSpler were significantly higher than those of the traditional BioSampler (SKC Inc.) in terms of samples' bacterial diversity. The developed sampler coupled with a robot has been successfully applied to sampling airborne SARS-CoV-2 in both Wuhan and Beijing during the COVID-19 outbreaks. With a high sampling flow, the Yao-CSpler was shown to be able to collect the SARS-CoV-2 with a detectable concentration level down to 9-219 viruses m-3 in clinical settings housing COVID-19 patients. Further more efficient bioaerosol sampler, which is able to rapidly capture low level pathogenic agents, is urgently required to better understand and confront airborne transmission of infectious diseases.

Whose Knowledge? Whose Influence? Changing Dynamics of China's Development Cooperation Policy and Practice*

This article aims to investigate the recent evolution of China's development policy and practice. More precisely, how do China's policymakers and practitioners understand and debate China's role in international development, specifically in the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic? China's growing development activities overseas, particularly in the African continent, have spurred intense debate over its role as a rising power in international development. China is viewed in the West both as a threat and as a valuable potential partner in development cooperation. However, differences between Western and Chinese conceptions of development have complicated cooperation and understanding of China's development policy. Further understanding of these differences is needed, in order to evaluate their implications for low-income countries, and for potential trilateral cooperation.

2-((1H-indol-3-yl)thio)-N-phenyl-acetamides: SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase inhibitors

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the causative agent of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite intensive and global efforts to discover and develop novel antiviral therapies, only Remdesivir has been approved as a treatment for COVID-19. Therefore, effective antiviral therapeutics are still urgently needed to combat and halt the pandemic. Viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrates high potential as a reliable target for the development of antivirals. We previously developed a cell-based assay to assess the efficiency of compounds that target SARS-CoV-2 RdRp, as well as their tolerance to viral exoribonuclease-mediated proof-reading. In our previous study, we discovered that 2-((1H-indol-3-yl)thio)-N-phenyl-acetamides specifically targets the RdRp of both respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza A virus. Thus, we hypothesize that 2-((1H-indol-3-yl)thio)-N-phenyl-acetamides may also have the ability to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication by targeting its RdRp activity. In this research, we test a compound library containing 103 of 2-((1H-indol-3-yl)thio)-N-phenyl-acetamides against SARS-CoV-2 RdRp, using our cell-based assay. Among these compounds, the top five candidates strongly inhibit SARS-CoV-2 RdRp activity while exhibiting low cytotoxicity and resistance to viral exoribonuclease. Compound 6-72-2a is the most promising candidate with the lowest EC50 value of 1.41 mu M and highest selectivity index (CC50/EC50) (above 70.92). Furthermore, our data suggests that 4-46b and 6-72-2a also inhibit the replication of HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-NL63 virus in a dose-dependent manner. Compounds 4-46b and 6-72-2a exhibit EC50 values of 1.13 mu M and 0.94 mu M, respectively, on HCoV-OC43 viral replication. However, higher concentrations of these compounds are needed to effectively block HCoV-NL63 replication. Together, our findings successfully identified 4-46b and 6-72-2a as promising inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2 RdRp.

A cross-sectional survey on information access through hospital's official account on new media and its association with antenatal care knowledge and health behaviors of pregnant women under COVID-19 epidemic

Objective To explore the association between accessing antenatal care information through hospitals' official new media accounts and antenatal care knowledge and individual prevention behavior under COVID-19 epidemic, and to provide evidence for improving the emergency plan for maternity health care services in China under public health emergencies. Methods The online survey was conducted from Feb 5th to Mar 1st, 2020, at the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic in China. Approaches of accessing antenatal care information, COVID-19 related antenatal care knowledge and individual prevention behavior was collected via cross-sectional design. Results A total of 1 936 valid questionnaires were obtained from 21 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. Under the COVID-19 epidemic, 75.4% of the pregnant women reported they got institutional service and health education information from hospitals' official new media accounts such as WeChat and Weibo. Multivariate Logistic analysis showed that pregnant women who received information from official accounts of new media had higher scores of COVID-19 relevant antenatal care knowledge (aOR=1.36, 95%CI:1.08-1.71, P<0.01)and individual prevention behaviors(aOR=1.46, 95%CI:1.18-1.82, P<0.01) than those who obtained information from other sources. Conclusion The access to antenatal care knowledge via hospitals' official social media accounts was associated with better antenatal care knowledge and individual prevention behaviors among pregnant women. Under major public health emergency, it is suggested for health institutions to disseminate antenatal health care information via hospitals' official accounts in new media like Wechat and Weibo. Appropriate training should be developed to ensure the quality of health education and service provision in official new media accounts. © 2021, Editorial Department of Fudan University Journal of Medical Sciences. All right reserved.

Safety and efficacy of oral lopinavir/ritonavir in pediatric patients with coronavirus disease: a nationwide comparative analysis.

OBJECTIVE: Because of the limited treatment options available, oral lopinavir/ritonavir (LPR) was used for treating coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in pediatric patients. This study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of LPR in COVID-19 pediatric patients with mild symptoms. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This retrospective multicenter analysis included hospitalized children with mild COVID-19 who received LPR at one of 13 hospitals in China from January 1, 2020, to June 1, 2020. Patients treated with LPR were matched with patients not treated with LPR (1:4) according to age, sex, and length of symptom onset and hospitalization. Descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests were applied to compare differences between groups. Kaplan-Meier probability curves and Cox regression models were used to analyze nasal swab turning negative time (recovery time) and hospital discharge days. RESULTS: In total, 23 patients treated with LPR were matched with 92 untreated controls. The median age of patients was 6 years, and 56.52% of them were male. All patients were discharged from the hospital after being cured. The treatment group had a longer nasal swab turning negative time (hazard ratio [HR] 5.33; 95% CI: 1.94-14.67; p = 0.001) than the control group. LPR treatment was also associated with a longer hospitalization time (HR 2.01; 95% CI: 1.24-3.29; p = 0.005). After adjusting for the influence of LPR treatment, adverse drug reaction events were associated with a longer nasopharyngeal swab negative time (HR 4.67; 95% CI 1.35-16.11; p = 0.015). CONCLUSIONS: For children with mild COVID-19, LPR is inferior to conventional treatment in reducing virus shedding time and hospitalization duration and is associated with increased adverse reactions.

Application of "Universal Formula" in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 and its innovative development

In the history of fighting the plague, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has the tradition of using "Universal Formula" with "cauldron boiling medicine". The practice of prevention and treatment of plague with "Universal Formula" is not only one of the important characteristics of TCM, but also deeply embodies the scientific connotation of the plague prevention and control model of "disease differentiation and treatment" combined with "syndrome differentiation and treatment". In the battle against COVID-19, a batch of contemporary anti-epidemic "Universal Formula" represented by "Hanshiyi Formula (Wuhan anti-epidemic prescription)" and "Qingfei Paidu Decoction" were used for both treatment and prevention. It covered a large number of people and had significant clinical effects. It has become a sharp weapon for TCM to intervene in anti-epidemic work. The "Universal Formula" used in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 not only retains the essence of the traditional "Universal Formula" for anti-epidemic, but also has innovations in legislative prescriptions, drug formulations, drug distribution forms, medication guidance, and drug efficacy research, which reflects the development of the anti-epidemic with "Universal Formula". This article discussed the overview and diagnosis of the plague and treatment model of "disease differentiation and treatment" combined with "syndrome differentiation and treatment", the theoretical basis of anti-epidemic theory of "Universal Formula", and the innovation and development of the application of "Universal Formula". Under the background of science and technology, the important value and strategic path of "Universal Formula" will be used to help the in-depth development of anti-epidemic work of TCM in the face of new and sudden large-scale plagues in the future. © 2020, Chinese Journal of New Drugs Co. Ltd. All right reserved.

[The keypoints in treatment of the critical coronavirus disease 2019 patient(1)].

COVID-19 has been prevalent in Wuhan and spread rapidly to all of our country. Some cases can develop into ARDS, or even death. We will share the treatment experience of severe COVID-19 with the first-line treatment experience. The best respiratory support mode should be selected, but the timing of intubation and protection during intubation are two difficulties; patients with high level peep and poor effect in prone position can be given ECMO support. For COVID-19 patients with mechanical ventilation, reasonable sedation and analgesia strategies should be formulated; delirium should not be ignored. In addition, there is up regulation of inflammatory factors in patients with severe COVID-19, but the effect of renal replacement therapy needs to be further confirmed by clinical research.