scholarly journals On the Effect of the Respiratory Droplet Generation Condition on COVID-19 Transmission

Fluids ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Ali Hosseinpour Shafaghi ◽  
Farzad Rokhsar Talabazar ◽  
Ali Koşar ◽  
Morteza Ghorbani

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a highly infectious viral disease and first appeared in Wuhan, China. Within a short time, it has become a global health issue. The sudden emergence of COVID-19 has been accompanied by numerous uncertainties about its impact in many perspectives. One of major challenges is understanding the underlying mechanisms in the spread of this outbreak. COVID-19 is spread similar to the majority of infectious diseases through transmission via relatively large respiratory droplets. The awareness of the dispersal of these droplets is crucial in not only improving methods for controlling the dispersion of COVID-19 droplets, but also in discovering fundamental mechanisms of its transmission. In this study, a numerical model is developed to study the motion of droplets expelled through the respiratory system. Based on the source of these droplets, different sizes of droplets such as large ones and aerosols, which behave differently in the environment, can be generated. In this regard, diverse sources of droplets, namely breathing, coughing, and sneezing, are considered in this analysis. Besides, the time for a single droplet to fall from a height of 1.8 m is also obtained. The results reveal that the traditional distances suggested by different sources for keeping the social distance are not enough, which is linked to different nature of the droplet generation.

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh Wilton ◽  
Diana T. Sanchez ◽  
Lisa Giamo

Biracial individuals threaten the distinctiveness of racial groups because they have mixed-race ancestry, but recent findings suggest that exposure to biracial-labeled, racially ambiguous faces may positively influence intergroup perception by reducing essentialist thinking among Whites ( Young, Sanchez, & Wilton, 2013 ). However, biracial exposure may not lead to positive intergroup perceptions for Whites who are highly racially identified and thus motivated to preserve the social distance between racial groups. We exposed Whites to racially ambiguous Asian/White biracial faces and measured the perceived similarity between Asians and Whites. We found that exposure to racially ambiguous, biracial-labeled targets may improve perceptions of intergroup similarity, but only for Whites who are less racially identified. Results are discussed in terms of motivated intergroup perception.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Allen Thornton ◽  
Miriam E. Weaverdyck ◽  
Judith Mildner ◽  
Diana Tamir

One can never know the internal workings of another person – one can only infer others’ mental states based on external cues. In contrast, each person has direct access to the contents of their own mind. Here we test the hypothesis that this privileged access shapes the way people represent internal mental experiences, such that they represent their own mental states more distinctly than the states of others. Across four studies, participants considered their own and others’ mental states; analyses measured the distinctiveness of mental state representations. Two neuroimaging studies used representational similarity analyses to demonstrate that the social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one’s own states versus others’. Two behavioral studies support these findings. Further, they demonstrate that people differentiate between states less as social distance increases. Together these results suggest that we represent our own mind with greater granularity than the minds of others.


Author(s):  
N. D. Borshchik

The article considers little-studied stories in Russian historiography about the post-war state of Yalta — one of the most famous health resorts of the Soviet Union, the «pearl» of the southern coast of Crimea. Based on the analysis of mainly archival sources, the most important measures of the party and Soviet leadership bodies, the heads of garrisons immediately after the withdrawal of the fascist occupation regime were analyzed. It was established that the authorities paid priority attention not only to the destroyed economy and infrastructure, but also to the speedy introduction of all-Union and departmental sanatoriums and recreation houses, other recreational facilities. As a result of their coordinated actions in the region, food industry enterprises, collective farms and cooperative artels, objects of cultural heritage and the social and everyday sphere were put into operation in a short time.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Allan ◽  
Nir Oren ◽  
Jacqui Hutchison ◽  
Douglas Martin

AbstractIf artificial intelligence (AI) is to help solve individual, societal and global problems, humans should neither underestimate nor overestimate its trustworthiness. Situated in-between these two extremes is an ideal ‘Goldilocks’ zone of credibility. But what will keep trust in this zone? We hypothesise that this role ultimately falls to the social cognition mechanisms which adaptively regulate conformity between humans. This novel hypothesis predicts that human-like functional biases in conformity should occur during interactions with AI. We examined multiple tests of this prediction using a collaborative remembering paradigm, where participants viewed household scenes for 30 s vs. 2 min, then saw 2-alternative forced-choice decisions about scene content originating either from AI- or human-sources. We manipulated the credibility of different sources (Experiment 1) and, from a single source, the estimated-likelihood (Experiment 2) and objective accuracy (Experiment 3) of specific decisions. As predicted, each manipulation produced functional biases for AI-sources mirroring those found for human-sources. Participants conformed more to higher credibility sources, and higher-likelihood or more objectively accurate decisions, becoming increasingly sensitive to source accuracy when their own capability was reduced. These findings support the hypothesised role of social cognition in regulating AI’s influence, raising important implications and new directions for research on human–AI interaction.


Author(s):  
Simin Zou ◽  
Xuhui He

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has caused a traffic tie-up across the world. In addition to home quarantine orders and travel bans, the social distance guideline of about six feet was enacted to reduce the risk of contagion. However, with recent life gradually returning to normal, the crisis is not over. In this research, a moving train test and a Gaussian puff model were employed to investigate the impact of wind raised by a train running on the transmission and dispersion of SARS-CoV-2 from infected individuals. Our findings suggest that the 2 m social distance guideline may not be enough; under train-induced wind action, human respiratory disease-carrier droplets may travel to unexpected places. However, there are deficiencies in passenger safety guidelines and it is necessary to improve the quantitative research in the relationship between train-induced wind and virus transmission. All these findings could provide a fresh insight to contain the spread of COVID-19 and provide a basis for preventing and controlling the pandemic virus, and probe into strategies for control of the disease in the future.


2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722110027
Author(s):  
Kyle Fiore Law ◽  
Dylan Campbell ◽  
Brendan Gaesser

Is altruism always morally good, or is the morality of altruism fundamentally shaped by the social opportunity costs that often accompany helping decisions? Across four studies, we reveal that in cases of realistic tradeoffs in social distance for gains in welfare where helping socially distant others necessitates not helping socially closer others with the same resources, helping is deemed as less morally acceptable. Making helping decisions at a cost to socially closer others also negatively affects judgments of relationship quality (Study 2) and in turn, decreases cooperative behavior with the helper (Study 3). Ruling out an alternative explanation of physical distance accounting for the effects in Studies 1 to 3, social distance continued to impact moral acceptability when physical distance across social targets was matched (Study 4). These findings reveal that attempts to decrease biases in helping may have previously unconsidered consequences for moral judgments, relationships, and cooperation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 01-03
Author(s):  
Efraín Sánchez González ◽  
Fé Fernández Hernández

Background. Smoking is given by the tobacco consumption. Thus all smoking economic benefits are based on this fact. Some economic sectors are benefited from the smoking economic impact over the health services demand. The magnitude of these economic benefits is given by the relevancy from the effective demand of health services attributable to smoking. Objective. To describe the main economic benefits attributable to smoking. Materials and methods. As theoric methods were used the historic – logic the inductive – deductive and the comparative. As empiric method it used the bibliographic research. Results. The financial resources able to access to the health services may be limited by the same reason that motive the health service demand: the smoking. One of the more singular economic benefits from smoking is given by the smoker earlier death. The smoker over-mortality carries to reduce the demand of Social Security services to retired people agree to life expectation reduction. Much times the unquestionable health valued isn´t sufficiently considered by fiscal authorities who consider more important at short time the practice value from the smoking economic benefits. That’s why it isn´t sufficient with the understanding and acknowledge from the smoking impact over the life quality and life expectation. Conclusion. The social and the human development may not be supported in the existence of a risk factor that reduces the life value reducing the health quality and life expectative at same time, which raise the living cost and favor to a reduced people number across the addiction to the nicotine.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Simone Santini

We develop a model of infection spread that takes into account the existence of a vulnerable group as well as the variability of the social relations of individuals. We develop a compartmentalized power-law model, with power-law connections between the vulnerable and the general population, considering these connections as well as the connections among the vulnerable as parameters that we vary in our tests. We use the model to study a number of vaccination strategies under two hypotheses: first, we assume a limited availability of vaccine but an infinite vaccination capacity, so all the available doses can be administered in a short time (negligible with respect to the evolution of the epidemic). Then, we assume a limited vaccination capacity, so the doses are administered in a time non-negligible with respect to the evolution of the epidemic. We develop optimal strategies for the various social parameters, where a strategy consists of (1) the fraction of vaccine that is administered to the vulnerable population and (2) the criterion that is used to administer it to the general population. In the case of a limited vaccination capacity, the fraction (1) is a function of time, and we study how to optimize it to obtain a maximal reduction in the number of fatalities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1483
Author(s):  
Eyal Levi ◽  
Susanne Fischer ◽  
Hadar Fisher ◽  
Roee Admon ◽  
Sigal Zilcha-Mano

The importance of the role of affect in psychotherapy for major depressive disorder (MDD) is well established, but the common use of self-reported measures may limit our understanding of its underlying mechanisms. A promising predictor of patient affect is the stress hormone cortisol. To date, no studies have studied in-session changes in cortisol in psychotherapy for MDD. We investigated whether an increase in patient cortisol over the course of a session correlated with higher negative and lower positive affect. Given previous findings on healthy individuals on the contagious nature of stress, an additional aim was to examine whether these relationships are moderated by therapist cortisol. To this end, 40 dyads (including 6 therapists) provided saliva samples before and after four pre-specified sessions (616 samples). After each session, the patients provided retrospective reports of in-session affect. We found no association between patient cortisol and affect. However, increases in patient cortisol predicted negative affect when the therapists exhibited decreases in cortisol, and increases in patient cortisol predicted positive affect when the therapists showed increases. Our study provides initial evidence for the importance of the social context in the cortisol–affect relationship in MDD.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-203
Author(s):  
Emilaine Ferreira dos Santos ◽  
Estela Iraci Rabito ◽  
Caryna Eurich Mazur ◽  
Rubia Daniela Thieme ◽  
Maria Eliana Madalozzo Schieferdecker

Home enteral nutrition (HEN) provides care for the special need for food at home. Although the majority of patients in HEN is clinically stable, support from health professionals, and monitoring and evaluation for maintenance or evolution of therapy are necessary. However, the current pandemic situation of COVID-19 and the lack of specific treatment for coronavirus infection have led to changes in the health services work routine. The social distance recommendation to contain the progress of COVID-19 interferes with the home care service. Thus, in order to provide assistance effectively and safely to the patient, family members and health professionals, adaptations can be made. Therefore, the objective of this manuscript is to discuss elements and recommendations that contribute to HEN care during the COVID-19 pandemic.


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