ABSTRACT
According to literature reports, the injury rate of the athletes in Olympic Winter Games recent years was as high as 10%-14%. Combined with the background of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the medical insurance work of the 24th Olympic Winter Games held in Beijing had put forward more complicated requirements and more severe challenges. In order to better optimize anesthesia management, this article summarized the perioperative treatment of athletes in Olympic Winter Games, the safety protection strategy of medical staff under general anesthesia, and the potential impact of peri-operative drugs on athletes. Anesthesiologists, as the core members of the rescue team, should be familiar with the particularity of operative anesthesia of athletes, sum up relevant experience to ensure the safety of perioperative patients. So all kinds of technical measures should be taken in the process of operation to minimize the indoor pollution caused by the patient's cough. For example, all the patients should wear N95 masks from the ward to the operating room, and after the operation, wear the N95 masks back to the ward. Although the International Olympic Committee had banned more than 200 drugs for participants and athletes who had to strictly follow International Olympic Committee requirements during anesthesia, the athletes were no longer participating in this Olympic Winter Games, so opioids (sufentanil and remifentanil) and glucocorticoid (dexamethasone) could be used according to the actual needs of surgery and anesthesia. Five athletes in Yanqing competition area underwent surgical anesthesia in Peking University Third Hospital Yanqing Hospital. All the five patients received general anesthesia, of whom four underwent orthopaedic surgery and one underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy. General anesthesia with laryngeal mask airway was the first choice in the five patients. And the pain after orthopaedic surgery was severe and nerve block technique could effectively relieve the pain after surgery. Three patients received ultrasound-guided nerve block analgesia, the postoperative analgesia lasted 36 h. After the operation, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) was infused intravenously in the ward and all the patients recovered uneventfully. As the core member of the trauma rescue team, anesthesiologists should be familiar with the particularity of the athletes' surgical anesthesia, do a good job in medical security, and summarize relevant experience to ensure the life safety of the perioperative patients.
ABSTRACT
In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the Chinese government implemented blockade measures in Hubei, which largely affected the emission of pollutants. This work is aimed to explore the effects of epidemics on pollutants at different temperatures in Hubei, China. We applied for a panel nonlinear model with autonomous search thresholds to explore this, using daily average temperature as a threshold variable, and PM2.5 set as the explained variable, and the cumulative number of confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 cases set as the explanatory variable. An empirical analysis was conducted by running the proposed model and using nine cities in China most impacted by the pandemic. The results show that there was a non-linear negative relationship between the cumulative number of confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 cases and PM2.5. A more detailed non-linear relationship between the two was uncovered by the proposed panel threshold regression model. When the temperature crosses the threshold value (12.5 degrees C and 20.5 degrees C) in sequence, the estimated value was -0.0688, -0.0934, and -0.1520 in that order. This means that this negative non-linear relationship increased with increasing temperature. This work helps to explore the effect of coronavirus disease 2019 on pollutions at different temperatures and provides a methodological reference to study their nonlinear relationship.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) is a growing resource of scientific papers on COVID-19 and related historical coronavirus research. CORD-19 is designed to facilitate the development of text mining and information retrieval systems over its rich collection of metadata and structured full text papers. Since its release, CORD-19 has been downloaded over 200K times and has served as the basis of many COVID-19 text mining and discovery systems. In this article, we describe the mechanics of dataset construction, highlighting challenges and key design decisions, provide an overview of how CORD-19 has been used, and describe several shared tasks built around the dataset. We hope this resource will continue to bring together the computing community, biomedical experts, and policy makers in the search for effective treatments and management policies for COVID-19. © ACL 2020.All right reserved.
ABSTRACT
In sparsely occupied large industrial and commercial buildings, large-diameter ceiling fans1 (LDCFs) are commonly utilized for comfort cooling and destratification;however, a limited number of studies were conducted to guide the operation of these devices during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study conducted 223 parametrical computational-fluid-dynamics (CFD) simulations of LDCFs in the U.S. Department of Energy warehouse reference building to compare the impacts of fan operations, index-person, and worker-packing-line locations on airborne exposures to infectious aerosols under both summer and winter conditions. The steady-state airflow fields were modeled while transient exposures to particles of varying sizes (0.5–10 μm) were evaluated over an 8-h period. Both the airflow and aerosol models were validated by measurement data from the literature. It was found that it is preferable to create a breeze from LDCFs for increased airborne dilution into a sparsely occupied large warehouse, which is more similar to an outdoor scenario than a typical indoor scenario. Operation of fans at the highest feasible speed while maintaining thermal-comfort requirements consistently outperformed the other options in terms of airborne exposures. There is no substantial evidence that fan reversal is beneficial in the current large space of interest. Reversal flow direction to create upward flows at higher fan speeds generally reduced performance compared with downward flows, as there was less airflow through the fan blades at the same rotational speed. Reversing flow at lower fan speeds decreased airflow speeds and dilution in the space and, thus, increased whole-warehouse concentrations. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd
ABSTRACT
In the past few years, significant efforts have been made to investigate the transmission of COVID-19. This paper provides a review of the COVID-19 airborne transmission modeling and mitigation strategies. The simulation models here are classified into airborne transmission infectious risk models and numerical approaches for spatiotemporal airborne transmissions. Mathematical descriptions and assumptions on which these models have been based are discussed. Input data used in previous simulation studies to assess the dispersion of COVID-19 are extracted and reported. Moreover, measurements performed to study the COVID-19 airborne transmission within indoor environments are introduced to support validations for anticipated future modeling studies. Transmission mitigation strategies recommended in recent studies have been classified to include modifying occupancy and ventilation operations, using filters and air purifiers, installing ultraviolet (UV) air disinfection systems, and personal protection compliance, such as wearing masks and social distancing. The application of mitigation strategies to various building types, such as educational, office, public, residential, and hospital, is reviewed. Recommendations for future works are also discussed based on the current apparent knowledge gaps covering both modeling and mitigation approaches. Our findings show that different transmission mitigation measures were recommended for various indoor environments;however, there is no conclusive work reporting their combined effects on the level of mitigation that may be achieved. Moreover, further studies should be conducted to understand better the balance between approaches to mitigating the viral transmissions in buildings and building energy consumption. © 2022
ABSTRACT
Outdoor fresh air ventilation plays a significant role in reducing airborne transmission of diseases in indoor spaces. School classrooms are considerably challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the increasing need for in-person education, untimely and incompleted vaccinations, high occupancy density, and uncertain ventilation conditions. Many schools started to use CO2 meters to indicate air quality, but how to interpret the data remains unclear. Many uncertainties are also involved, including manual readings, student numbers and schedules, uncertain CO2 generation rates, and variable indoor and ambient conditions. This study proposed a Bayesian inference approach with sensitivity analysis to understand CO2 readings in four primary schools by identifying uncertainties and calibrating key parameters. The outdoor ventilation rate, CO2 generation rate, and occupancy level were identified as the top sensitive parameters for indoor CO2 levels. The occupancy schedule becomes critical when the CO2 data are limited, whereas a 15-min measurement interval could capture dynamic CO2 profiles well even without the occupancy information. Hourly CO2 recording should be avoided because it failed to capture peak values and overestimated the ventilation rates. For the four primary school rooms, the calibrated ventilation rate with a 95% confidence level for fall condition is 1.96+/-0.31 ACH for Room #1 (165 m3 and 20 occupancies) with mechanical ventilation, and for the rest of the naturally ventilated rooms, it is 0.40+/-0.08 ACH for Room #2 (236 m3 and 21 occupancies), 0.30+/-0.04 or 0.79+/-0.06 ACH depending on occupancy schedules for Room #3 (236 m3 and 19 occupancies), 0.40+/-0.32,0.48+/-0.37,0.72+/-0.39 ACH for Room #4 (231 m3 and 8-9 occupancies) for three consecutive days.
ABSTRACT
The aim of the study is to test the nexus between energy prices risk and energy efficiency for energy transition to recommend the implication for the period of COVID-19 crises. This study uses short-term daily data of G-20 countries for COVID-19 crises was taken to better estimate the study findings. To estimate the results Data Envelopment Analysis estimation method was applied for empirical inference. The findings revealed that the COVID-19 crises have the biggest negative influence with 47.1% on oil prices which raised energy prices risk at large. The aforementioned results hold even after substituting the magnitude of extreme list of variables, re-estimating the equations with energy efficiency. Such risk has further halted energy efficiency with 33.69% in G-20 countries during COVID-19 which is one of the largest dent of the mankind history. Our results also inferred that the relationship of energy prices risk with energy efficiency remained significant but negative with energy transition. Extending to it, the post-COVID-19, the danger of energy stock price crashes is expected to diminish dramatically. The study suggest that the corporations must participate in greater corporate social responsibility activities have lower post-COVID-19 energy price collapse risk. Finally, we demonstrate that post-COVID-19, the impact of COVID-19 on energy price collapse risk.
ABSTRACT
Having a large number of timely donations during the early stages of a COVID-19 breakout would normally be considered rare. Donation is a special public goods game with zero yield for donors, and it has the characteristics of the prisoners' dilemma. This paper discusses why timely donations in the early stages of COVID-19 occurred. Based on the idea that donation is a strategy adopted by players during interconnection on account of their understanding of the environment, donation-related populations are placed on social networks and the inter-correlation structures in the population are described by scale-free networks. Players in donation-related populations are of four types: donors, illegal beneficiaries, legal beneficiaries, and inactive people. We model the evolutionary game of donation on a scale-free network. Donors, illegal beneficiaries and inactive people learn and update strategies under the Fermi update rule, whereas the conversion between legal beneficiaries and the other three types is determined by the environment surrounding the players. We study the evolution of cooperative action when the agglomeration coefficient, the parameters of the utility function, the noise intensity, the utility coefficient, the donation coefficient and the initial states of the population on the scale-free network change. For population sizes of 50, 100, 150, and 200, we give the utility functions and the agglomeration coefficients for promoting cooperation and study the corresponding steady states and structural characteristics of the population. We identify the best ranges of the noise intensity K, the donation coefficient alpha and the utility coefficient beta for promoting cooperation at different population sizes. Furthermore, with the increase of the population size, the donor traps are found. At the same time, it is discovered that the initial states of the population have a great impact on the steady states;thus the upper and lower triangle phenomena are proposed. We also find that the population size itself is also an important factor for promoting donation, pointing out the direction of efforts to further promote donation and achieve better social homeostasis under the donation model.
ABSTRACT
According to literature reports, the injury rate of the athletes in Olympic Winter Games recent years was as high as 10%-14%. Combined with the background of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the medical insurance work of the 24th Olympic Winter Games held in Beijing had put forward more complicated requirements and more severe challenges. In order to better optimize anesthesia management, this article summarized the perioperative treatment of athletes in Olympic Winter Games, the safety protection strategy of medical staff under general anesthesia, and the potential impact of peri-operative drugs on athletes. Anesthesiologists, as the core members of the rescue team, should be familiar with the particularity of operative anesthesia of athletes, sum up relevant experience to ensure the safety of perioperative patients. So all kinds of technical measures should be taken in the process of operation to minimize the indoor pollution caused by the patient's cough. For example, all the patients should wear N95 masks from the ward to the operating room, and after the operation, wear the N95 masks back to the ward. Although the International Olympic Committee had banned more than 200 drugs for participants and athletes who had to strictly follow International Olympic Committee requirements during anesthesia, the athletes were no longer participating in this Olympic Winter Games, so opioids (sufentanil and remifentanil) and glucocorticoid (dexamethasone) could be used according to the actual needs of surgery and anesthesia. Five athletes in Yanqing competition area underwent surgical anesthesia in Peking University Third Hospital Yanqing Hospital. All the five patients received general anesthesia, of whom four underwent orthopaedic surgery and one underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy. General anesthesia with laryngeal mask airway was the first choice in the five patients. And the pain after orthopaedic surgery was severe and nerve block technique could effectively relieve the pain after surgery. Three patients received ultrasound-guided nerve block analgesia, the postoperative analgesia lasted 36 h. After the operation, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) was infused intravenously in the ward and all the patients recovered uneventfully. As the core member of the trauma rescue team, anesthesiologists should be familiar with the particularity of the athletes' surgical anesthesia, do a good job in medical security, and summarize relevant experience to ensure the life safety of the perioperative patients.
ABSTRACT
The management of breast cancer patients in the current COVID-19 outbreak is challenging. Myelosuppres-sion associated with cancer treatment may increase the risk of infection in both hospitals and at home. We implemented the following strategy to reduce myelosuppression of adjuvant chemotherapy during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) changing the original regimen of AC x 4-* wT x 12 to wT x 12-* AC x 4. (2) substitution of standard paclitaxel with nanoparticle albumin-bound (nab)-paclitaxel (nab-paclitaxel). For 43 patients who com-IP: 14.98.160.66 On: Fri, 13 May 2022 09:27:55 pleted nab-paclitaxel treatment, the compliance rate was 100%, without interruption or delay of nab-paclitaxel Copyright: American Scientific Publishers Delivered by Ingenta treatment. Dose reduction was necessary in 2 patients (4.6%) due to peripheral neuropathy. Thus, 98.6% of the planned doses were administered. As expected, the adjusted adjuvant regimen was safe and well toler-ated. Therefore wT x 12-* AC x 4 treatment procedure may be considered for breast cancer patients during COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen causing COVID-19, has caused more than 200 million confirmed cases, resulting in more than 4.5 million deaths worldwide by the end of August, 2021. Upon detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection by pattern recognition receptors (PRRs), multiple signaling cascades are activated, which ultimately leads to innate immune response such as induction of type I and III interferons, as well as other antiviral genes that together restrict viral spread by suppressing different steps of the viral life cycle. Our understanding of the contribution of the innate immune system in recognizing and subsequently initiating a host response to an invasion of SARS-CoV-2 has been rapidly expanding from 2020. Simultaneously, SARSCoV-2 has evolved multiple immune evasion strategies to escape from host immune surveillance for successful replication. In this review, we will address the current knowledge of innate immunity in the context of SARS-CoV-2 infection and highlight recent advances in the understanding of the mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 evades a host's innate defense system.
ABSTRACT
Purpose Psychosocial factors have received increasing attention regarding significantly influencing safety in the construction industry. This research attempts to comprehensively summarize psychosocial factors related to safety performance of construction workers. In the context of coronavirus disease 2019, some typical psychosocial factors are selected to further analyze their influence mechanism of safety performance. Design/methodology/approach First, a literature review process was conducted to identify and summarize relevant psychosocial factors. Then, considering the impact of the epidemic, hypotheses on the relationship between six selected psychosocial factors (i.e. work stress, role ambiguity, work-family conflict, autonomy, social support and interpersonal conflict) and safety performance were proposed, and a hypothetical model was developed based on job demands-resources theory. Finally, a meta-analysis was used to examine these hypotheses and the model. Findings The results showed these psychosocial factors indirectly influenced workers' safety performance by impacting on their occupational psychology condition (i.e. burnout and engagement). Work stress, role ambiguity, work-family conflict and interpersonal conflict were negatively related to safety performance by promoting burnout and affecting engagement. Autonomy and social support were positively related to safety performance by improving work engagement and reducing burnout. Originality/value This research is the pioneer systematically describing the overall picture of psychosocial factors related to the safety performance of construction workers. Through deeply discussed the mechanism of psychosocial factors and safety performance, it could provide a reference for the theory and application of psychosocial factors in the field of construction safety management.
ABSTRACT
We introduce scientific claim verification, a new task to select abstracts from the research literature containing evidence that SUPPORTS or REFUTES a given scientific claim, and to identify rationales justifying each decision. To study this task, we construct SCIFACT, a dataset of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales. We develop baseline models for SCIFACT, and demonstrate that simple domain adaptation techniques substantially improve performance compared to models trained on Wikipedia or political news. We show that our system is able to verify claims related to COVID-19 by identifying evidence from the CORD-19 corpus. Our experiments indicate that SCIFACT will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems designed to retrieve and reason over corpora containing specialized domain knowledge. Data and code for this new task are publicly available at https://github.com/allenai/scifact. A leader-board and COVID-19 fact-checking demo are available at https://scifact.apps.allenai.org. © 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics.
ABSTRACT
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the third-most deadly disease in the world and will be a major healthcare problem for decades to come. Its etiology is mainly related to the exposure to cigarette smoke and poisonous gases, and the infections of viruses including COVID-19 induce acute exacerbation of COPD, which may cause death in patients. Few advances have been made in COPD pathological mechanism, and the current clinical treatment strategies focus on both bronchodilator and anti-inflammatory interventions;but with limited clinical therapeutic agents, COPD therapies still lack more drugs especially those that antagonize COPD-specific inflammatory responses. We review the COPD clinically applied drugs, and the progress of research on new drugs and related novel targets, including beta(2) agonists and anti-muscarinic drugs for airway diastole, glucocorticoids and phosphodiesterase-4 inhibitors for anti-inflammatory, protease inhibitors, emerging antioxidants, adhesion factor inhibitors, growth factor antagonists, adenylate cyclase agonists, chemokine antagonists, etc. We thus provide insights on the COPD new drugs research and development.
ABSTRACT
With coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spreading, the rhythm of clinical trials has been challenged. Based on the guidelines and relevant regulations of clinical trials during the epidemic period, the Drum Tower Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing University School of medicine has designed a survey to investigate the current situation of clinical trials. Association, CRA, clinical research coordinator (CRC), and test managers were involved in the research. According to the survey results, most researchers reflected that the progress of clinical trials was affected (68.24%), and the clinical trials of non-oral drugs were greatly affected (69.96%), which was mainly manifested in the malignant tumor project (88.2%), during the trial, the most obvious influence is 92.7% for out of visit window, and the subject worrying about the deterioration of disease (78.97%), the risk of drug overtemperature exists in mailing drugs (60.09%), and the number of trials timeliness (89.09%) and integrity (79.61%) were the most affected. Therefore, it is a new working mode for our clinical trial institutions to improve the emergency mechanism of clinical trials, strengthen the supervision of trials, and realize the sharing of clinical trial data and the whole process information management. © 2021, Chinese Journal of New Drugs Co. Ltd. All right reserved.
ABSTRACT
In January 2020, a new coronavirus epidemic broke out in China, when the emission characteristics of air pollution have changed significantly. To study the characteristics of PM2.5 components under this scenario, a series of online observation instruments were used in Zhengzhou, Anyang, and Xinxiang cities from January 1 to February 13, 2020. The study period is divided into pre-holiday (January 1 to 23), mid-holiday outbreak (January 24 to 31), and post-holiday outbreak (February 1 to 13) based on the Spring Festival holiday and the outbreak of the epidemic. Affected by the outbreak and favorable meteorological conditions, the concentrations of other pollutants except O3 in the three cities during the post-holiday outbreak were significantly lower than those during pre-holiday, especially NO2 decreased by 65%, 52%, and 72% and PM2.5 decreased by 51%, 55%, and 54%, respectively. Note that the pollutants remained high concentration, indicating that a large improvement in winter air quality in Henan Province will face great challenges in the future. Secondary inorganic aerosols and organic matter were the main components of PM2.5 during the observation periods. During the mid-holiday outbreak, the three cities were less affected by fireworks, and the contribution of nitrate and dust decreased slightly compared to before the pre-holiday. After the holiday, the proportions of nitrate decreased by 10.6%, 4.1%, and 4% in Zhengzhou, Anyang, and Xinxiang, respectively. In contrast, the proportions of sulfate and secondary organic carbon increased. Taking Zhengzhou City as an example to analyze the formation of nitrate, compared to pre-holiday, the proportions of nitrate under different pollution levels in the post-holiday outbreak have decreased, but nitrate was still the highest proportion of PM2.5 during the polluted period. The characteristics of diurnal variation indicate that the increase in O3 concentration and humidity in the atmosphere during the post-holiday outbreak may promote the conversion of NO2. Therefore, the next step should be to adopt the coordinated management and control of PM2.5 and O3 and pay attention to the coordinated reduction of NO2 and VOCs. © 2020, Editorial Board of China Environmental Science. All right reserved.