[Clinical features of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 Omicron variant infection in children: an analysis of 201 cases]. / 201ä¾‹å„¿ç«¥æ–°åž‹å† çŠ¶ç— æ¯’Omicronå˜å¼‚æ ªæ„ŸæŸ“çš„ä¸´åºŠç‰¹å¾åˆ†æž.

OBJECTIVES: To study the clinical features of children with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Omicron variant infection. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was performed on the medical data of 201 children with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who were hospitalized and diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant infection in Quanzhou First Hospital from March 14 to April 7, 2022. Among the 201 children, there were 34 children with asymptomatic infection and 167 with symptomatic infection. The two groups were compared in terms of clinical features, results of experimental examinations, and outcome. RESULTS: Of all the 201 children, 161 (80.1%) had a history of exposure to COVID-19 patients and 132 (65.7%) had a history of COVID-19 vaccination. Among the 167 children with symptomatic infections, 151 had mild COVID-19 and 16 had common COVID-19, with no severe infection or death. Among the 101 children who underwent chest CT examination, 16 had ground glass changes and 20 had nodular or linear opacities. The mean time to nucleic acid clearance was (14±4) days for the 201 children with Omicron variant infection, and the symptomatic infection group had a significantly longer time than the asymptomatic infection group [(15±4) days vs (11±4) days, P<0.05]. The group vaccinated with one or two doses of COVID-19 vaccine had a significantly higher positive rate of IgG than the group without vaccination (P<0.05). The proportions of children with increased blood lymphocyte count in the symptomatic infection group was significantly lower than that in the asymptomatic infection group (P<0.05). Compared with the asymptomatic infection group, the symptomatic infection group had significantly higher proportions of children with increased interleukin-6, increased fibrinogen, and increased D-dimer (P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Most of the children with Omicron variant infection have clinical symptoms, which are generally mild. The children with symptomatic infection are often accompanied by decreased or normal blood lymphocyte count and increased levels of interleukin-6, fibrinogen, and D-dimer, with a relatively long time to nucleic acid clearance. Some of them had ground glass changes on chest CT.

SimH: a novel representation learning model with activation and projection mechanisms for COVID-19 knowledge bases.

The emergence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had a significant impact on healthcare and the economy. To understand the COVID-19 disease mechanism and the related biological functions in the short term, both clinicians and scientists are making every effort to find an efficient way to collect and explore the vast amount of COVID-19-related knowledge. Representation learning has been highlighted as a promising method to construct a COVID-19 knowledge graph. However, most existing representation learning models do not perform very well when dealing with the COVID-19 knowledge graph because of its low-connected star-like structure and various nonlinear relationships. In this study, we propose a novel representation learning model called translation on hyperplanes with an activation operation and similar semantic sampling (SimH) for COVID-19 knowledge graphs. Specifically, the activation operation is designed to provide additional interaction features for low-in-degree entities by interaction feature permutation and share relation-specific partitions of pairwise interactions by an activation vector. As a result, problems that fewer features are captured from low-in-degree entities are alleviated. Moreover, hyperplane projection is introduced to the distance-based scoring function so that nonlinear relationships can be modeled while the lower complexity is maintained, as compared to other nonlinear models. To consider that negative sampling can improve the embedding quality of fact triples, a negative triplet sampling method that adaptively replaces entities with similar semantics is introduced to generate reliable negative triplets. Extensive experiments are conducted on the COVID-19-Concepts dataset. The experimental results show that our SimH model achieves significant improvements in prediction and classification accuracy over existing knowledge representation learning models.

Global Tendency and Frontiers of Research on Myopia From 1900 to 2020: A Bibliometrics Analysis.

Background: Myopia is one of the most common causes of vision impairment in children and adults and has become a public health priority with its growing prevalence worldwide. This study aims to identify and evaluate the global trends in myopia research of the past century and visualize the frontiers using bibliometric analysis. Methods: The literature search was conducted on the Web of Science for myopia studies published between 1900 and 2020. Retrieved publications were analyzed in-depth by the annual publication number, prolific countries and institutions, core author and journal, and the number of citations through descriptive statistics. Collaboration networks and keywords burst were visualized by VOSviewer and CiteSpace. Myopia citation network was visualized using CitNetExplorer. Results: In total, 11,172 publications on myopia were retrieved from 1900 to 2020, with most published by the United States. Saw SM, from the National University of Singapore, contributed the most publications and citations. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science was the journal with highest number of citations. Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery with the maximum number of publications. The top 10 cited papers mainly focused on the epidemiology of myopia. Previous research emphasized myopia-associated experimental animal models, while recent keywords include "SMILE" and "myopia control" with the stronger burst, indicating a shift of concern from etiology to therapy and coincided with the global increment of incidence. Document citation network was clustered into six groups: "prevalence and risk factors of myopia," "surgical control of myopia," "pathogenesis of myopia," "optical interventions of myopia," "myopia and glaucoma," and "pathological myopia." Conclusions: Bibliometrics analysis in this study could help scholars comprehend global trends of myopia research frontiers better. Hundred years of myopia research were clustered into six groups, among which "prevalence and risk factors of myopia" and "surgical control of myopia" were the largest groups. With the increasing prevalence of myopia, interventions of myopia control are a potential research hotspot and pressing public health issue.

Impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 interventions on the incidence of hand, foot, and mouth disease in mainland China.

BACKGROUND: In early 2020, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were implemented in China to reduce and contain the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) transmission. These NPIs might have also reduced the incidence of hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD). METHODS: The weekly numbers of HFMD cases and meteorological factors in 31 provincial capital cities and municipalities in mainland China were obtained from Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) and National Meteorological Information Center of China from 2016 to 2020. The NPI data were collected from local CDCs. The incidence rate ratios (IRRs) were calculated for the entire year of 2020, and for January-July 2020 and August-December 2020. The expected case numbers were estimated using seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average models. The relationships between kindergarten closures and incidence of HFMD were quantified using a generalized additive model. The estimated associations from all cities were pooled using a multivariate meta-regression model. FINDINGS: Stringent NPIs were widely implemented for COVID-19 control from January to July 2020, and the IRRs for HFMD were less than 1 in all 31 cities, and less than 0·1 for 23 cities. Overall, the proportion of HFMD cases reduced by 52·9% (95% CI: 49·3-55·5%) after the implementation of kindergarten closures in 2020, and this effect was generally consistent across subgroups. INTERPRETATION: The decrease in HFMD incidence was strongly associated with the NPIs for COVID-19. HFMD epidemic peaks were either absent or delayed, and the final epidemic size was reduced. Kindergarten closure is an intervention to prevent HFMD outbreaks. FUNDING: This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81973102 & 81773487), Public Health Talents Training Program of Shanghai Municipality (GWV-10.2-XD21), the Shanghai New Three-year Action Plan for Public Health (GWV-10.1-XK16), the Major Project of Scientific and Technical Winter Olympics from National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFF0306000), 13th Five-Year National Science and Technology Major Project for Infectious Diseases (2018ZX10725-509) and Key projects of the PLA logistics Scientific research Program (BHJ17J013).

Epidemiological features of COVID-19 patients with prolonged incubation period and its implications for controlling the epidemics in China.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 patients with long incubation period were reported in clinical practice and tracing of close contacts, but their epidemiological or clinical features remained vague. METHODS: We analyzed 11,425 COVID-19 cases reported between January-August, 2020 in China. The accelerated failure time model, Logistic and modified Poisson regression models were used to investigate the determinants of prolonged incubation period, as well as their association with clinical severity and transmissibility, respectively. RESULT: Among local cases, 268 (10.2%) had a prolonged incubation period of > 14 days, which was more frequently seen among elderly patients, those residing in South China, with disease onset after Level I response measures administration, or being exposed in public places. Patients with prolonged incubation period had lower risk of severe illness (ORadjusted = 0.386, 95% CI: 0.203-0.677). A reduced transmissibility was observed for the primary patients with prolonged incubation period (50.4, 95% CI: 32.3-78.6%) than those with an incubation period of ≤14 days. CONCLUSIONS: The study provides evidence supporting a prolonged incubation period that exceeded 2 weeks in over 10% for COVID-19. Longer monitoring periods than 14 days for quarantine or persons potentially exposed to SARS-CoV-2 should be justified in extreme cases, especially for those elderly.

COVID-19 negatively impacts on psychological and somatic status in frontline nurses.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has become a public health emergency based on its clinical characteristics. Previous studies demonstrated that the onset of a sudden and immediately life-threatening illness could lead to extraordinary amounts of psychological pressure on nurses who play an important role in the illness. Whether COVID-19 pandemic has greater impacts on the psychological status and somatic symptoms from nurses who stand in the frontline of this crisis remain unclear. METHODS: We evaluated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and somatic symptoms in the frontline nurses (n = 438) who served in Wuhan, China, during COVID-19 crisis. Nurses who did not worked in the frontline of COVID-19 served as controls (n = 452). The investigation was processed by online questionnaires including: impact of event scale-revised (IES-R) , self-rating anxiety scale (SAS), and somatic symptoms. RESULTS: Prevalence of moderate and severe PTSD was significantly increased in the frontline nurses compared to non-frontline nurses. Prevalence of mild anxiety was significantly increased in frontline nurses compared to non-frontline nurses. There were more frontline nurses suffering from severe insomnia and losing weight compared to non-frontline nurses. Severity of PTSD (IES-R score), but not severity of anxiety (SAS score) was similarly positively correlated to incidence of insomnia and weight loss in both frontline and non-frontline nurses to a similar extent. LIMITATIONS: The results only represented psychological statues and somatic symptom on one time point thus the development of psychological stress and somatic symptom during pandemic of COVID-19 in the frontline nurses were missing. CONCLUSIONS: COVID-19 negatively impacted on psychological and somatic status in frontline nurses. PTSD may be the most reliability and validity criteria for evaluating psychological and somatic status for frontline nurses of COVID-19.

Meteorological conditions are heterogeneous factors for COVID-19 risk in China.

Whether meteorological factors influence COVID-19 transmission is an issue of major public health concern, but available evidence remains unclear and limited for several reasons, including the use of report date which can lag date of symptom onset by a considerable period. We aimed to generate reliable and robust evidence of this relationship based on date of onset of symptoms. We evaluated important meteorological factors associated with daily COVID-19 counts and effective reproduction number (Rt) in China using a two-stage approach with overdispersed generalized additive models and random-effects meta-analysis. Spatial heterogeneity and stratified analyses by sex and age groups were quantified and potential effect modification was analyzed. Nationwide, there was no evidence that temperature and relative humidity affected COVID-19 incidence and Rt. However, there were heterogeneous impacts on COVID-19 risk across different regions. Importantly, there was a negative association between relative humidity and COVID-19 incidence in Central China: a 1% increase in relative humidity was associated with a 3.92% (95% CI, 1.98%-5.82%) decrease in daily counts. Older population appeared to be more sensitive to meteorological conditions, but there was no obvious difference between sexes. Linear relationships were found between meteorological variables and COVID-19 incidence. Sensitivity analysis confirmed the robustness of the association and the results based on report date were biased. Meteorological factors play heterogenous roles on COVID-19 transmission, increasing the possibility of seasonality and suggesting the epidemic is far from over. Considering potential climatic associations, we should maintain, not ease, current control measures and surveillance.

COVID-19 transmission in Mainland China is associated with temperature and humidity: A time-series analysis.

COVID-19 has become a pandemic. The influence of meteorological factors on the transmission and spread of COVID-19 is of interest. This study sought to examine the associations of daily average temperature (AT) and relative humidity (ARH) with the daily counts of COVID-19 cases in 30 Chinese provinces (in Hubei from December 1, 2019 to February 11, 2020 and in other provinces from January 20, 2020 to Februarys 11, 2020). A Generalized Additive Model (GAM) was fitted to quantify the province-specific associations between meteorological variables and the daily cases of COVID-19 during the study periods. In the model, the 14-day exponential moving averages (EMAs) of AT and ARH, and their interaction were included with time trend and health-seeking behavior adjusted. Their spatial distributions were visualized. AT and ARH showed significantly negative associations with COVID-19 with a significant interaction between them (0.04, 95% confidence interval: 0.004-0.07) in Hubei. Every 1 °C increase in the AT led to a decrease in the daily confirmed cases by 36% to 57% when ARH was in the range from 67% to 85.5%. Every 1% increase in ARH led to a decrease in the daily confirmed cases by 11% to 22% when AT was in the range from 5.04 °C to 8.2 °C. However, these associations were not consistent throughout Mainland China.