A Comprehensive Health Effects Assessment of the Use of Sanitizers and Disinfectants during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Global Survey (preprint)

COVID-19 has affected all aspects of human life so far. From the outset of the pandemic, preventing the spread of COVID-19 through the observance of health protocols, especially the use of sanitizers and disinfectants was given more attention. Despite the effectiveness of disinfection chemicals in controlling and preventing COVID-19, there are critical concerns about their adverse effects on human health. This study aims to assess the health effects of sanitizers and disinfectants on a global scale. A total of 91056 participants from 154 countries participated in this cross-sectional study through an electronic questionnaire. Results implied that detergents (67%), alcohol-based materials (56%), and chlorinated compounds (32%) were the most commonly used types of sanitizers and disinfectants. Most frequently reported health issues include skin complications 48.8% and respiratory complications 29.8%. The Chi-square test showed a significant association between chlorinated compounds with all possible health complications under investigation (p-value < 0.001). Examination of risk factors based on multivariate regression analysis showed that alcohols-based materials were associated with skin complications (OR, 1.98; 95%CI, 1.87–2.09), per-chlorine was associated with eye complications (OR, 1.83; 95%CI, 1.74–1.93), and highly likely with itching and throat irritation (OR, 2.00; 95%CI, 1.90–2.11). Furthermore, formaldehyde was associated with a higher prevalence of neurological complications (OR, 2.17; 95%CI, 1.92–2.44). The findings of the current study suggest that health authorities need to implement more awareness programs about the side effects of using sanitizers and disinfectants during viral epidemics.

A Deep Learning Based Method for Forecasting Gold Price with Respect to Pandemics (preprint)

The spread of COVID-19 in the world had a devastating impact on the world economy, trade relations, and globalization. As the pandemic advances and new potential pandemics are on the horizon, a precise analysis of recent fluctuations of trade becomes necessary for international decisions and controlling the world in a similar crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic made a new pattern of trade in the world and affected how businesses work and trade with each other. It means that every potential pandemic or any unprecedented event in the world can change the market rules. This research develops a novel model to have a proper estimation of the stock market values with respect to the COVID-19 dataset using long short-term memory networks (LSTM). The nature of the features in each pandemic is completely different, thus, prediction results for a pandemic by a specific model cannot be applied to other pandemics. Hence, recognizing and extracting the features which affect the pandemic is the highest priority. In this study, we develop a framework, providing a better understanding of the features and feature selection. Although the global impacts incurred by COVID-19 are complicated, here we are trying to show how additional features like COVID-19 rather than the history of tickers, which is used conventionally for prediction, cab help forecasting in a real-world scenario. This study is based on a preliminary analysis of such features for enhancing forecasting models' performance against fluctuations in the market. Our forecasts are based on the market value data and COVID-19 pandemic daily time-series data (i.e. the number of new cases). In this study, we selected Gold price as a base for our forecasting task which can be replaced by any other markets. We have applied Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) LSTM, Vector Output Sequence LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, and Encoder-Decoder LSTM on our dataset, and our results achieved an MSE of 6.0e-4, 8.0e-4, and 2.0e-3 on the validation set respectfully for one day, two days, and 30 days predictions in advance which are outperforming other proposed method in the literature.

Phosphate levels and pulmonary damage in COVID-19 patients based on CO-RADS scheme: is there any link between parathyroid gland and COVID-19? (preprint)

Background: Preliminary studies of COVID-19 have provided some evidence that electrolyte disturbances may also be present in patients. In this study we aimed to evaluate the role of the arrival electrolytes and symptoms in prediction of Lung damage in CT scan based on the CO-RADS system. Methods: This was a retrospective cross-sectional analytical study. We included patients with laboratory confirmed COVID-19 infection, June 15 to July 7. Patients were included in study if there were no previous history of kidney disease. Demographic, clinical characteristics, laboratory findings, and CO-RADS High-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) of lung report were collected. Univariate logistic regression was employed first to identify the effective, correlated items. All statistics were performed with SPSS version 18.0. Results: In the current study, 36 (20 male- 16 female) patients with mean age of the 54.7 (STD:17.5) years old were studied. Most common symptom at the arrival was the Fever (52.8%), followed by Fatigue (18%), and dyspnea (44.4%). Computed tomography assessment revealed CO-RADS 2 in 4 (11.1%) patients, CO-RADS 3 in 1 (2.8%), CO-RADS 4 in 20 (55.6%), and CO-RADS 5 in 11 (30.6%) patients. In the comparison with the study groups based on the HRCT status (CO-RADS II,III vs. CO-RADS IV,V), patients with severe HRCT damage had significantly lower level of Phosphorus (P<0.05). Univariate logistic regression analysis showed that only one factors was associated with HRCT damage status (Phosphorus, P=0.040). Phosphorus upper than 4.5 was associated with better HRCT results with OR ratio of 3.71 (X2(1)=5.69; p=0.017). Conclusion: Our study illustrates that higher phosphate levels may be associated with better CT scan of lung outcomes in COVID-19; while hypophosphatemia is associated with severe lung injuries. This could help clinicians to manage hospitalized patients and may link the COVID-19 and parathyroid gland.

Successful management of the first case of SARS‐CoV‐2 infection in an Iranian HIV patient (preprint)

There are limited data regarding HIV/AIDS associated-COVID-19 infection. This article reports a case of HIV female with an acute SARS‐CoV‐2 infection that successfully managed and treated in Iran. This study presents the clinical symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of this case.