scholarly journals REVIEW ARTICLE: EPIDEMIOLOGY OF COVID’19

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Idahor Courage ◽  
Okuma Oghenevwede ◽  
Anugom Gene-Genald ◽  
Willie Gabriel ◽  
Akwazie   Chukwunonso ◽  
...  

Purpose: To carefully review and understand the cause, distribution, progression, determinants and deterrents of COVID-19. Methodology: Peer reviewed data relevant to study was collected from PubMed, Google Scholar, WHO database, Research gate and Wikipedia based on pre-set inclusion and exclusion criteria. Findings: Covid-19 is a principally respiratory illness caused by the novel Corona Virus (SARS-CoV2). It started as an epidemic in Wuhan, China in December 2019, became a pandemic in March 2020 and have now infected almost 22 million people over 216 countries causing about three-quarter of a million deaths. It spreads primarily through droplets, aerosols or contact with contaminated surfaces. Illness is usually mild to moderate flu-like symptoms but can be asymptomatic as well as severe especially in patients with underlying co-morbidities. Testing can either be antigen based through polymerase chain reaction or antibody based.  Treatment is generally supportive while the efficacy of diverse pharmacological remains controversial. Public education, early diagnosis and isolation, restriction of gatherings and movements have been the main method used worldwide to tackle this outbreak. Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: Emphasizes the infectivity of SARS-CoV2 virus and need for health practitioners and general public to adhere strictly to preventive measures in order to avert a global second wave of the pandemic. Conclusion: COVID-19 is an infectious disease that have rapidly spread from china to the world at large. A lot of efforts and policies have been made to prevent and control its spread. There’s need to adhere to guidelines in order to reduce spread and subsequent mortality especially amongst vulnerable groups. As many countries commence protocols to re-open, there’s need to do so in line with lessons learnt during this outbreak to avoid a more devastating second wave.

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Karthikeyan P. Iyengar ◽  
Rachit Jain ◽  
David Ananth Samy ◽  
Vijay Kumar Jain ◽  
Raju Vaishya ◽  
...  

As COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide, policies have been developed to contain the disease and prevent viral transmission. One of the key strategies has been the principle of “‘test, track, and trace” to minimize spread of the virus. Numerous COVID-19 contact tracing applications have been rolled around the world to monitor and control the spread of the disease. We explore the characteristics of various COVID-19 applications and especially the Aarogya Setu COVID-19 app from India in its role in fighting the current pandemic. We assessed the current literature available to us using conventional search engines, including but not limited to PubMed, Google Scholar, and Research Gate in May 2020 till the time of submission of this article. The search criteria used MeSH keywords such as “COVID-19,” “pandemics,” “contact tracing,” and “mobile applications.” A variable uptake of different COVID-19 applications has been noted with increasing enrolment around the world. Security concerns about data privacy remain. The various COVID-19 applications will complement manual contact tracing system to assess and prevent viral transmission. Test, track, trace, and support policy will play a key role in avoidance of a “second wave” of the novel coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 outbreak.


2020 ◽  
Vol 187 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Riccarda Antiochia

AbstractThe severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and novel coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) epidemics represent the biggest global health threats in the last two decades. These infections manifest as bronchitis, pneumonia or severe, sometimes fatal, respiratory illness. The novel coronavirus seems to be associated with milder infections but it has spread globally more rapidly becoming a pandemic. This review summarises the state of the art of nanotechnology-based affinity biosensors for SARS, MERS and COVID-19 detection. The nanobiosensors are antibody- or DNA-based biosensors with electrochemical, optical or FET-based transduction. Various kinds of nanomaterials, such as metal nanoparticles, nanowires and graphene, have been merged to the affinity biosensors to enhance their analytical performances. The advantages of the use of the nanomaterials are highlighted, and the results compared with those obtained using non-nanostructured biosensors. A critical comparison with conventional methods, such as RT-PCR and ELISA, is also reported. It is hoped that this review will provide interesting information for the future development of new reliable nano-based platforms for point-of-care diagnostic devices for COVID-19 prevention and control.


Author(s):  
Ebrahim Sahafizadeh ◽  
Samaneh Sartoli

AbstractBackgroundAs reported by Iranian governments, the first cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) infections confirmed in Qom, Iran on February 19, 2020 (30 Bahman 1398). The number of identified cases afterward increased rapidly and the novel coronavirus spread to all provinces of the country. This study aimed to fit an epidemic model to the reported cases data to estimate the basic reproduction number (R0) of COVID-19 in Iran.MethodsWe used data from February 21, 2020, to April 21, 2020, on the number of cases reported by Iranian governments and we employed the SIR (Susceptible-Infectious-Removed) epidemic spreading model to fit the transmission model to the reported cases data by tuning the parameters in order to estimate the basic reproduction number of COVID-19 in Iran.ResultsThe value of reproduction number was estimated 4.86 in the first week and 4.5 in the second week. it decreased from 4.29 to 2.37 in the next four weeks. At the seventh week of the outbreak the reproduction number was reduced below one.ConclusionsThe results indicate that the basic reproduction number of COVID-19 was significantly larger than one in the early stages of the outbreak. However, implementing social distancing and preventing travelling on Nowruz (Persian New Year) effectively reduced the reproduction number. Although the results indicate that reproduction number is below one, it is necessary to continue social distancing and control travelling to prevent causing a second wave of outbreak.


2007 ◽  
pp. 4-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Satarov

Two aspects of the problem of corruption are discussed in the article. The first one concerns the evaluation of the level of corruption. The method of measuring the size of business corruption market is described. The specifics of its estimation as well as its relation with the main macroeconomic indexes are discussed. The second aspect regards the strategies of corruption reduction. The importance of establishing external control over the bureaucracy is noted. The failure of institutions transplantation as the main method of economic transformations is pointed out. The gaps in social knowledge are discussed, which decrease effectiveness of institutional borrowings.


Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Hai-Feng Ling ◽  
Zheng-Lian Su ◽  
Xun-Lin Jiang ◽  
Yu-Jun Zheng

In a large-scale epidemic, such as the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19), there is huge demand for a variety of medical supplies, such as medical masks, ventilators, and sickbeds. Resources from civilian medical services are often not sufficient for fully satisfying all of these demands. Resources from military medical services, which are normally reserved for military use, can be an effective supplement to these demands. In this paper, we formulate a problem of integrated civilian-military scheduling of medical supplies for epidemic prevention and control, the aim of which is to simultaneously maximize the overall satisfaction rate of the medical supplies and minimize the total scheduling cost, while keeping a minimum ratio of medical supplies reservation for military use. We propose a multi-objective water wave optimization (WWO) algorithm in order to efficiently solve this problem. Computational results on a set of problem instances constructed based on real COVID-19 data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.


2014 ◽  
Vol 654 ◽  
pp. 187-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong Hua Zhao ◽  
Jian Ying Tian ◽  
Dong Song Li ◽  
Chang Sheng Ai

Clinical treatment for mandible defects is Mandible Reconstruction Surgery (MRS) including bone grafts, distraction osteogenesis and bone tissue engineering, however, MRS is operated by doctors without 3D navigation at present which leads to lots of disadvantages such as bad operational control, low positioning accuracy and poor stability. Therefore, a robotic surgical system was designed to assist surgeons on manipulating. For this study, the robot system was given in brief, then mechanical design and control system of the novel three-arm robot.And experiment results in this study show that the robot works stably and accurately. The development of this medical robot system contributes to the promotion and popularization of the MRS in clinics.


Author(s):  
Lee-Huang Chen ◽  
Kyunam Kim ◽  
Ellande Tang ◽  
Kevin Li ◽  
Richard House ◽  
...  

This paper presents the design, analysis and testing of a fully actuated modular spherical tensegrity robot for co-robotic and space exploration applications. Robots built from tensegrity structures (composed of pure tensile and compression elements) have many potential benefits including high robustness through redundancy, many degrees of freedom in movement and flexible design. However to fully take advantage of these properties a significant fraction of the tensile elements should be active, leading to a potential increase in complexity, messy cable and power routing systems and increased design difficulty. Here we describe an elegant solution to a fully actuated tensegrity robot: The TT-3 (version 3) tensegrity robot, developed at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with NASA Ames, is a lightweight, low cost, modular, and rapidly prototyped spherical tensegrity robot. This robot is based on a ball-shaped six-bar tensegrity structure and features a unique modular rod-centered distributed actuation and control architecture. This paper presents the novel mechanism design, architecture and simulations of TT-3, the first untethered, fully actuated cable-driven six-bar tensegrity spherical robot ever built and tested for mobility. Furthermore, this paper discusses the controls and preliminary testing performed to observe the system’s behavior and performance.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Yang Liu ◽  
Shuhan Wang ◽  
Peng Dong ◽  
Xiangyang Xu

An electric oil pump (EOP) was integrated into the hydraulic system and an automatic transmission (AT) mechanical oil pump (MOP) was downsized. These processes were performed to combine a start-stop function with the AT and further improve the transmission efficiency. Furthermore, this study established a dynamics model of power loss and leakage of an 8-speed AT; a flow-based control algorithm of the EOP was then developed to realize the start-stop function and support the MOP to meet the flow requirement of the system. Based on a driving simulation method, sizes of the MOP and EOP that ensured optimal fuel economy were selected. A control strategy for the starting clutch was also developed to minimize the starting delay of the test vehicle. A test environment on a rig and prototype vehicle was established to verify the feasibility of the proposed control strategies. The test results indicated that the transmission functioned favorably with the novel two-pump system presented, and a quick and smooth starting performance was achieved when the engine was restarted. The findings in this study are extremely valuable for forward designs of an AT for realizing start-stop function and improving efficiency.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed S. Elgazzar

Abstract The novel COVID-19 pandemic is a current, major global health threat. Up till now, there is no fully approved pharmacological treatment or a vaccine. Also, its origin is still mysterious. In this study, simple mathematical models were employed to examine the dynamics of transmission and control of COVID-19 taking into consideration social distancing and community awareness. Both situations of homogeneous and nonhomogeneous population were considered. Based on the calculations, a sufficient degree of social distancing based on its reproductive ratio is found to be effective in controlling COVID-19, even in the absence of a vaccine. With a vaccine, social distancing minimizes the sufficient vaccination rate to control the disease. Community awareness also has a great impact in eradicating the virus transmission. The model is simulated on small-world networks and the role of social distancing in controlling the infection is explained.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-233
Author(s):  
Melissa Adomako ◽  
Alaei Kamiar ◽  
Abdulla Alshaikh ◽  
Lyndsay S Baines ◽  
Desiree Benson ◽  
...  

Abstract The science of global health diplomacy (GHD) consists of cross-disciplinary, multistakeholder credentials comprised of national security, public health, international affairs, management, law, economics and trade policy. GHD is well placed to bring about better and improved multilateral stakeholder leverage and outcomes in the prevention and control of cancer. It is important to create an evidence base that provides clear and specific guidance for health practitioners in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) through involvement of all stakeholders. GHD can assist LMICs to negotiate across multilateral stakeholders to integrate prevention, treatment and palliative care of cancer into their commercial and trade policies.


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