Research progress on mechanism and clinic application of traditional Chinese medicine against coronavirus

Coronaviruses (CoVs) are the largest positive-strand RNA viruses discovered, with high variability and high infectivity. There are seven kinds of CoVs that can infect humans so far. Among them, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2003, middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in 2019 have caused global outbreaks, posing a serious threat to global public health security. Research on CoVs infection has never stopped, and the current treatment methods mainly focus on improving symptoms. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long history and rich experience in preventing and treating various diseases. In terms of anti-CoVs, TCM has attracted much attention because of its multi-CoVs and multi-targets, significant antiviral effect and few side effect. TCM extracts or their compounds can exert anti-CoVs effects by directly or indirectly inhibiting the invasion, replication, assembly of CoVs, regulating immunity and inhibiting inflammation. This article systematically reviews the mechanism and clinical application of TCM in anti-CoVs and alleviating virus-induced symptoms, in order to provide theoretical reference for the research and development of anti-coronavirus drugs. © 2023 Editorial Office of Chinese Traditional and Herbal Drugs. All rights reserved.

Research progress on mechanism and clinic application of traditional Chinese medicine against coronavirus

Coronaviruses (CoVs) are the largest positive-strand RNA viruses discovered, with high variability and high infectivity. There are seven kinds of CoVs that can infect humans so far. Among them, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2003, middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in 2019 have caused global outbreaks, posing a serious threat to global public health security. Research on CoVs infection has never stopped, and the current treatment methods mainly focus on improving symptoms. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long history and rich experience in preventing and treating various diseases. In terms of anti-CoVs, TCM has attracted much attention because of its multi-CoVs and multi-targets, significant antiviral effect and few side effect. TCM extracts or their compounds can exert anti-CoVs effects by directly or indirectly inhibiting the invasion, replication, assembly of CoVs, regulating immunity and inhibiting inflammation. This article systematically reviews the mechanism and clinical application of TCM in anti-CoVs and alleviating virus-induced symptoms, in order to provide theoretical reference for the research and development of anti-coronavirus drugs. Copyright © 2023 Editorial Office of Chinese Traditional and Herbal Drugs. All rights reserved.

[Management and short-term outcomes of neonates born to mothers infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant].

Objective: To summarize the management and short-term outcomes of neonates delivered by mothers infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. Methods: A retrospective study was performed on 158 neonates born to mothers infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant admitted to the isolation ward of Children's Hospital of Fudan University from March 15th, 2022 to May 30th, 2022. The postnatal infection control measures for these neonates, and their clinical characteristics and short-term outcomes were analyzed. They were divided into maternal symptomatic group and maternal asymptomatic group according to whether their mothers had SARS-CoV-2 symptoms. The clinical outcomes were compared between the 2 groups using Rank sum test and Chi-square test. Results: All neonates were under strict infection control measures at birth and after birth. Of the 158 neonates, 75 (47.5%) were male. The gestational age was (38+3±1+3) weeks and the birth weight was (3 201±463)g. Of the neonates included, ten were preterm (6.3%) and the minimum gestational age was 30+1 weeks. Six neonates (3.8%) had respiratory difficulty and 4 of them were premature and required mechanical ventilation. All 158 neonates were tested negative for SARS-COV-2 nucleic acid by daily nasal swabs for the first 7 days. A total of 156 mothers (2 cases of twin pregnancy) infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant, the time from confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection to delivery was 7 (3, 12) days. Among them, 88 cases (56.4%) showed clinical symptoms, but none needed intensive care treatment. The peripheral white blood cell count of the neonates in maternal symptomatic group was significantly higher than that in maternal symptomatic group (23.0 (18.7, 28.0) × 109 vs. 19.6 (15.4, 36.6) × 109/L, Z=2.44, P<0.05). Conclusions: Neonates of mothers infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant during third trimester have benign short-term outcomes, without intrauterine infection through vertical transmission. Strict infection control measures at birth and after birth can effectively protect these neonates from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

A POSSIBLE WAY FOR PREVENTING THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS

All living cells are affected deadly by their environmental temperature, a rela-tively higher temperature results in a higher metabolic rate, but when it reaches a threshold, its death acceleration occurs. The same principle is also valid for the Covid-19 virus. This paper suggests a sample way to its prevention by a hot cup of water under the noise. The vapor with a high temperature can make the virus greatly inactive. An optimal height from a boiling water surface is recommended. © 2022. Society of Thermal Engineers of Serbia.

MiniSeg: An Extremely Minimum Network for Efficient COVID-19 Segmentation

The rapid spread of the new pandemic, i.e., COVID-19, has severely threatened global health. Deep-learning-based computer-aided screening, e.g., COVID-19 infected CT area segmentation, has attracted much attention. However, the publicly available COVID-19 training data are limited, easily causing overfitting for traditional deep learning methods that are usually data-hungry with millions of parameters. On the other hand, fast training/testing and low computational cost are also necessary for quick deployment and development of COVID-19 screening systems, but traditional deep learning methods are usually computationally intensive. To address the above problems, we propose MiniSeg, a lightweight deep learning model for efficient COVID-19 segmentation. Compared with traditional segmentation methods, MiniSeg has several significant strengths: i) it only has 83K parameters and is thus not easy to overfit;ii) it has high computational efficiency and is thus convenient for practical deployment;iii) it can be fast retrained by other users using their private COVID-19 data for further improving performance. In addition, we build a comprehensive COVID-19 segmentation benchmark for comparing MiniSeg to traditional methods.

Chinese Economy under the New "Dual Circulation" Strategy: Challenges and Opportunities-A Summary of the Annual SUFE Macroeconomic Report (2020-2021)

Entering year 2020, the Chinese economy was struck by the COVID-19 outbreak. The unprecedented pandemic, entangled with the already elevated complexities in the nation's internal environment and external surroundings, aggravated its economic outlook. Internal factors including severe education mismatch in China's labor force, its vanishing demographic dividend, the declined purchasing power of its middle-income groups, risen leverage ratio of households and enterprises, and soared local government debt reinforced to weaken China's domestic demand. External factors, especially uncertainty in the China-US relation in the face of the re-shaping global value chain, dragged world economic recovery and thus China's exports and imports. This summary report highlights some major challenges and opportunities faced by the nation under its new development strategy that stresses internal circulation of domestic economy aided by its interaction with the globe. Our analyses based on IAR-CMM model provide a unified framework for addressing China's short-, medium-, and long-term issues in an internally coherent manner. Looking into year 2021, our benchmark projection reports an 8.4% annual real GDP growth rate. Alternative scenario analyses and policy simulations are conducted to assess the impacts of potential downside risks and the corresponding policy options for ensuring implicit targets. Through the lens of these analyses, we conclude that a refocus on effective management of internal demand, while deepening structural reforms on supply side and advancing orderly opening up, can help smooth the internal and external circulations of the Chinese economy to achieve high-quality development.

[Shanghai municipal expert consensus on standardized prevention and control of COVID-19 during procedures of oral radiology]

The announcement of National Health Commission on January 20, 2020 (No.1 of 2020) has included novel coronavirus pneumonia into the B class infectious diseases according to the law of the People's Republic of China on the prevention and control of infectious diseases, and has been managed as A class infectious diseases. People's governments at all levels and health administration departments have been paying high attention to it. With the alleviation of COVID-19 nationwide, dental clinics gradually resume to work. The main transmission routes of COVID-19 are respiratory droplets and contact transmission, hence oral radiological examination is kind of a high-risk operation. Standardized radiologic process is of great significance to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. In accordance with the national and Shanghai epidemic prevention requirements, and in combination with the actual situation of various medical institutions, Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology Committee of Shanghai Stomatological Association formulated the expert consensus on standardized prevention and control of COVID-19 for clinical reference. This recommendation will be updated according to the situation of epidemic prevention and control in China and the new relevant diagnosis and treatment plans.