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This study utilizes the enclosed and stable environment of underground space for long-term sustainable planning for urban epidemics and disasters. Owing to the COVID-19 epidemic, cities require long-term epidemic-disaster management. Therefore, this study proposed a strategy for integrating multiple functions to plan a comprehensive Underground Resilience Core (URC). A planning and assessment methods of URC were proposed. With this methodology, epidemic- and disaster- URCs were integrated to construct a comprehensive-URC in underground spaces. The results show: (1) Epidemic-resilient URCs adopting a joint progressive approach with designated hospitals can rapidly suppress an epidemic outbreak. (2) The regularity of the morphology of underground spaces determines the area of the URC. Bar-shaped underground spaces have the potential for planning disaster-URCs. (3) The URC planning efficiency ranking is as follows: Bar shapes lead overall, T shapes are second under seismic resilience, and Cross shapes are second under epidemic resilience. (4) The potential analysis of planning a comprehensive-URC in the underground parking in Chinese cities showed that the recovery time can be advanced from 29% to 39% and the comprehensive resilience can be improved by 37.63%. The results of this study can serve as sustainable urban planning strategies and assessment tools for long-term epidemic-disaster management.
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Background: Obesity, physical inactivity, excessive alcohol consumption, and poor diet are all modifiable risk factors for cancer. These unhealthy behaviors are disproportionally concentrated in racial and ethnic minorities and these disparities may have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examined racial and ethnic disparities in weight gain and other undesirable lifestyle changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and explored mechanisms underlying these lifestyle disparities. Methods: We used data from the 2020 Health, Ethnicity and Pandemic Study, a national survey representative of US households conducted in October 2020. Racial and ethnic minorities were oversampled. Participants were asked to report lifestyle behaviors before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined two outcomes in this study: weight gain and experiencing any undesirable lifestyle changes (i.e., reduced exercise time, increased alcohol drinking, or increased fast-food meal consumption). The primary exposure was race-ethnicity (non-Hispanic (NH) white, NH black, Hispanic, NH Asian, NH other race). Four sets of mediators were examined: socioeconomic status (education, household income, and undesirable job changes), family and friend social relationship change, perceived and experienced racism, and psychological distress. Weighted multivariable logistic regression models were performed. Mediation effects were examined with variance decomposition method. Results: A total of 2,709 participants were included in our sample. Compared with white respondents, black (OR = 1.71;p < 0.001) and Hispanic respondents (OR = 2.17;p < 0.001) were more likely to experience weight gain, controlling for age and sex. Among the hypothesized mediators, undesirable job changes during the pandemic, experiencing worse family relationship, and higher levels of psychological distress were all linked to higher odds of weight gain, but none of these variables played a salient role in mediating the black-white and Hispanic-white disparities in weight gain during the pandemic. As to the odds of experiencing undesirable lifestyle changes, black (OR = 1.76;p < 0.001), Hispanic (OR = 2.12;p < 0.001), and Asian respondents (OR = 1.42;p < 0.01) all exhibited disadvantages relative to white respondent. These disadvantages were largely attributable to perceived racism toward one's own group and psychological distress for all three minority groups. Conclusions: Racial and ethnic minorities were more likely to experience unhealthy lifestyle changes relative to white individuals during the pandemic in the United States, which can be partly attributable to higher levels of perceived racism and psychological distress. The long-term effects of racial/ethnic disparities of lifestyle change during the pandemic on cancer prevention warrant further research.
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Recent natural language processing (NLP) breakthroughs have proven effective for addressing many language-directed tasks, such as completing sentences and addressing search queries. This technology has been successfully implemented by tech firms including Google and others. An important element consists of language embeddings linked to pretraining systems. This ar ticle describes NLP concepts and their application to por tfolio models via a modern version of sentiment analysis. The authors demonstrate the advantages of employing information from Twitter along with the NLP for constructing a portfolio of stocks, especially during unusual events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 With Intelligence Ltd.
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Transport sustainability has become a major challenge worldwide. On-demand shared ride-hailing (OSR) is an alternative transport mode to private motorized mobility which allows passengers to share a vehicle and driver to their respective destination. OSR is more flexible than buses and cheaper than taxis. Additionally, ride-hailing services such as OSR play an important role in servicing communities with poor access to public transport (e.g., buses or trains) and people with increased vulnerabilities (e.g., women with children or people with disabilities). The present study investigates the impact of psychological factors on passengers' intention to use OSR services. To achieve this, the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was used and extended with perceived risk, price sensitivity, and perceived green value. Data were collected from 520 ride-hailing passengers in Vietnam. The results confirm the relevance of the original TPB constructs, i.e., attitudes, perceived behavioural control, and social norms. Concerning the three additional constructs, only perceived risk negatively and directly influences usage intention, while the two other constructs (i.e., price sensitivity and perceived green value) influence the intention to use OSR via attitudes. The results also reveal that the impact of perceived green value on usage intention is higher among females than males. Additionally, among middle- and high-income people, there is a significant negative association between perceived risk and intention, while this association is not significant among low-income participants. The findings from the present paper provide evidence of the importance of psychosocial factors such as perceptions of risk, price sensitivity, and sustainability when considering intention to use on-demand shared transport services. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd
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After the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in late 2019, civil engineering will play important roles in the urban comprehensive, resilient disaster and pandemic prevention construction. This paper combines the demand for urban pandemic prevention and control in China with the advantages of urban underground spaces for disaster prevention and pandemic responses in a comprehensive development plan. Emergency responses and pandemic control in urban underground spaces can provide safety, stability, adaptability to emergency medical conditions, low energy consumption underground emergency material storage, unified dispatching of emergency resources, and adaptability to urban development. An evaluation framework is given for urban underground space disaster and pandemic prevention to evaluate the resilience of such measures. The advantages of using urban underground spaces are illustrated by comparisons with other systems. The four topics, "stock", "increment", "variable" and "unified dispatching" in the disaster and pandemic prevention, are discussed to develop a resilience construction framework for urban underground spaces. Then, a comprehensive, resilient disaster and pandemic prevention construction framework for urban underground spaces is proposed to provide reference for the construction of resilient cities and urban underground spaces. © 2021, Tsinghua University Press. All right reserved.
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The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), is a threat to the global healthcare system and economic security. As of July 2020, no specific drugs or vaccines are yet available for COVID-19;a fast and accurate diagnosis for SARS-CoV-2 is essential in slowing the spread of COVID-19 and for efficient implementation of control and containment strategies. Magnetic nanosensing is an emerging topic representing the frontiers of current biosensing and magnetic areas. The past decade has seen rapid growth in applying magnetic tools for biological and biomedical applications. Recent advances in magnetic nanomaterials and nanotechnologies have transformed current diagnostic methods to nanoscale and pushed the detection limit to early-stage disease diagnosis. Herein, this review covers the literature of magnetic nanosensors for virus and pathogen detection before COVID-19. We review popular magnetic nanosensing techniques including magnetoresistance, magnetic particle spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Magnetic point-of-care diagnostic kits are also reviewed aiming at developing plug-and-play diagnostics to manage the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak as well as preventing future epidemics. In addition, other platforms that use magnetic nanomaterials as auxiliary tools for enhanced pathogen and virus detection are also covered. The goal of this review is to inform the researchers of diagnostic and surveillance platforms for SARS-CoV-2 and their performances. FAU - Wu, Kai