RESUMEN
COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-COV-2, which characterized with typical respiratory symptoms. In addition to the respiratory system injury, SARS-COV-2 may also invade other organs that express the cell surface receptor ACE2. Digestive system is a susceptible target of SARS-COV-2. Most patients show clinical symptoms of impaired digestive system during the course of the disease. Gastrointestinal symptoms of COVID-19 include anorexia, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and liver damage. Patients with abnormal symptoms of the digestive system have a greater chance of progressing to severe or critical illness, a worse prognosis, and a higher risk of death. This paper aims to discuss the digestive symptoms of COVID-19 infection, so as to improve the attention to the digestive system abnormalities and gastrointestinal symptoms of COVID-19 patients during clinical diagnosis, treatment and prevention and control.
RESUMEN
Sign language services are provided so that people with hearing loss are not alienated from socially and politically important information through TV broadcasting. In this paper, we conducted a user survey and evaluation of the current sign language services for deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) people, and solutions were proposed for the problems found in the course of the analyses. To this end, a total of five stages of research were conducted. First, the communication problems experienced by DHH individuals and previous studies on their language and information acquisition were investigated. Second, the most typical types of information delivery channels via TV were defined as news, discussions, and weather reports, and by investigating the actual sign language service cases for each type, three visual information delivery elements were identified: sign language interpreters, reference videos, and subtitles. Third, a preference survey, an interview survey, and an eye tracker experiment on the DHH participants were conducted with varying arrangement options of information delivery elements. Fourth, based on the results of the investigations and experiments, the options to be considered when arranging information delivery elements were compiled. The results showed that the sign language interpreter, which is the first element of information delivery, should be presented in a size clearly visible because the visibility of their facial expressions is important. In addition, it is recommended to present the interpreter without a background since DHH participants did not prefer the presence of a background. As for subtitles, which is the third element of information delivery, it was confirmed that the provision of sign language interpretation and subtitles together helped DHH participants to understand the contents more quickly and accurately. Moreover, if there are multiple speakers, individual subtitles for each speaker should be provided so that the viewers can understand who is talking. Reference videos, which are mainly placed on the screen background, the second information delivery element, were considered less important to DHH participants compared to sign language interpreters and subtitles, and it was found that DHH participants preferred reference videos to be visually separated from sign language interpreters. Fifth, based on the overall results of the study, a screen layout design was proposed for each type of information delivery element for DHH people. Contrary to the general conception that there would be no problem in viewing information-delivering TV broadcasts by DHH people simply by placing a sign language interpreter on the screen, the results of this study confirmed that a more delicate screen layout design is necessary for DHH people. It is expected that this study will serve as a helpful guide in providing better sign language services for TV broadcasts that can be conveniently viewed by both DHH and non-disabled people.
RESUMEN
BackgroundThe unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has been spreading for more than one and a half years. However, it is unclear whether the pandemic influenced admission in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) that never received COVID-19 patients during the early major outbreak in China.MethodsA retrospective study was conducted in a PICU in a tertiary hospital in Chengdu, southwestern China. We sought to describe the trend of admission number from pre-epidemic years (2018 and 2019) to 2021. We explored the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on PICU admission characteristics by including all patients younger than 18 years admitted to the PICU between January 23 and April 8 in 2020 and those admitted in the same time periods in pre-epidemic years and in 2021.ResultsThe percentage of patients admitted to the PICU from the Chengdu region increased from 34.2 percent in 2019 to 40.4 percent in 2020, whereas that from other provinces decreased from 11.7 percent in 2019 to 5.8 percent in 2020 (P = 0.012). The median length of stay (LOS) in the PICU was significantly longer in the 2020 cohort (4.0 days) than in the 2019 cohort (2.0 days) (P <0.001); the median hospital LOS was also significantly longer in the former (12.0 days) than in the latter (8.0 days) (P < 0.001). Both hospital outcomes (P = 0.005) and primary diagnosis distributions (P = 0.025) between the 2020 and 2019 cohorts were significant.ConclusionsIn a PICU that never received COVID-19 patients, the onset of the 2020 major outbreak was accompanied by changes in the composition of regions of patients, longer PICU and hospital stays, an increased proportion of unauthorized discharge and death, and a larger proportion of neoplasms, nervous system diseases and injury.