scholarly journals Clinical Differences between COVID-19 and a COVID-Like Syndrome

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2519
Author(s):  
Pierpaolo Di Micco ◽  
Giuseppe Camporese ◽  
Vincenzo Russo ◽  
Giuseppe Cardillo ◽  
Egidio Imbalzano ◽  
...  

COVID-19 is an infection due to SARS-CoV-2; this virus has been identified as the cause of the present pandemic. Several typical characteristics are present in this infection, in particular pneumonia with possible lung failure, but atypical clinical presentations are being described daily by physicians around the world. Ground-glass opacities with pneumonia are the most common and dangerous presentations of the COVID-19 disease, and they are usually associated with positive nasopharyngeal swab (NPS) tests with detectable SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA. Compared to the general population, hospital workers have been at a greater risk of infection ever since the first patients were hospitalized. However, hospital workers have also been reported as having COVID-like symptoms despite repeated negative swab tests but having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies with serological tests. We can postulate that a COVID-like syndrome is possible, in particular in hospital workers, that is characterized by symptoms similar to those of COVID-19, but with repeated negative nasopharyngeal swabs. These repeated negative NSPs make the difference in daily clinical management with people that experienced a single false negative nasopharyngeal swab; furthermore, a clear clinical differentiation of these situations is still lacking in the literature. For this reason, here, we report our main findings from a cohort of patients with a COVID-like syndrome compared to a similar group affected by typical COVID-19.

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. Grigoryev ◽  
V. A. Pavlyushina

The phenomenon of economic growth is studied by economists and statisticians in various aspects for a long time. Economic theory is devoted to assessing factors of growth in the tradition of R. Solow, R. Barrow, W. Easterly and others. During the last quarter of the century, however, the institutionalists, namely D. North, D. Wallis, B. Weingast as well as D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, have shown the complexity of the problem of development on the part of socioeconomic and political institutions. As a result, solving the problem of how economic growth affects inequality between countries has proved extremely difficult. The modern world is very diverse in terms of development level, and the article offers a new approach to the formation of the idea of stylized facts using cluster analysis. The existing statistics allows to estimate on a unified basis the level of GDP production by 174 countries of the world for 1992—2016. The article presents a structured picture of the world: the distribution of countries in seven clusters, different in levels of development. During the period under review, there was a strong per capita GDP growth in PPP in the middle of the distribution, poverty in various countries declined markedly. At the same time, in 1992—2016, the difference increased not only between rich and poor groups of countries, but also between clusters.


Author(s):  
Brian Willems

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Kunal Debnath

High culture is a collection of ideologies, beliefs, thoughts, trends, practices and works-- intellectual or creative-- that is intended for refined, cultured and educated elite people. Low culture is the culture of the common people and the mass. Popular culture is something that is always, most importantly, related to everyday average people and their experiences of the world; it is urban, changing and consumeristic in nature. Folk culture is the culture of preindustrial (premarket, precommodity) communities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00013
Author(s):  
Danny Susanto

<p class="Abstract">The purpose of this study is to analyze the phenomenon known as&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">“anglicism”: a loan made to the English language by another language.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism arose either from the adoption of an English word as a&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">result of a translation defect despite the existence of an equivalent&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">term in the language of the speaker, or from a wrong translation, as a&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">word-by-word translation. Said phenomenon is very common&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">nowadays and most languages of the world including making use of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">some linguistic concepts such as anglicism, neologism, syntax,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">morphology etc, this article addresses various aspects related to&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicisms in French through a bibliographic study: the definition of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism, the origin of Anglicisms in French and the current situation,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">the areas most affected by Anglicism, the different categories of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism, the difference between French Anglicism in France and&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">French-speaking Canada, the attitude of French-speaking society&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">towards to the Anglicisms and their efforts to stop this phenomenon.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">The study shows that the areas affected are, among others, trade,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">travel, parliamentary and judicial institutions, sports, rail, industrial&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">production and most recently film, industrial production, sport, oil industry, information technology,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">science and technology. Various initiatives have been implemented either by public institutions or by&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">individuals who share concerns about the increasingly felt threat of the omnipresence of Anglicism in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">everyday life.</span></p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 413-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Farouk Allam

Due to the international spread of COVID-19, the difficulty of collecting nasopharyngeal swab specimen from all suspected patients, the costs of RT-PCR and CT, and the false negative results of RT-PCR assay in 41% of COVID-19 patients, a scoring system is needed to classify the suspected patients in order to determine the need for follow-up, home isolation, quarantine or the conduction of further investigations. A scoring system is proposed as a diagnostic tool for suspected patients. It includes Epidemiological Evidence of Exposure, Clinical Symptoms and Signs, and Investigations (if available). This scoring system is simple, could be calculated in a few minutes, and incorporates the main possible data/findings of any patient.


Dreyfus argues that there is a basic methodological difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences, a difference that derives from the different goals and practices of each. He goes on to argue that being a realist about natural entities is compatible with pluralism or, as he calls it, “plural realism.” If intelligibility is always grounded in our practices, Dreyfus points out, then there is no point of view from which one can ask about or provide an answer to the one true nature of ultimate reality. But that is consistent with believing that the natural sciences can still reveal the way the world is independent of our theories and practices.


Respiration ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Catherine L. Oberg ◽  
Reza Ronaghi ◽  
Erik E. Folch ◽  
Colleen L. Channick ◽  
Tao He ◽  
...  

<b><i>Background:</i></b> The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has drastically affected hospital and operating room (OR) workflow around the world as well as trainee education. Many institutions have instituted mandatory preoperative SARS-CoV-2 PCR nasopharyngeal swab (NS) testing in patients who are low risk for COVID-19 prior to elective cases. This method, however, is challenging as the sensitivity, specificity, and overall reliability of testing remains unclear. <b><i>Objectives:</i></b> The objective of this study was to assess the concordance of a negative NS in low risk preoperative patients with lower airway bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) specimens obtained from the same patients. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We prospectively sent intraoperative lower airway BAL samples collected within 48 h of a negative mandatory preoperative NS for SARS-CoV-2 PCR testing. All adult patients undergoing a scheduled bronchoscopic procedure for any reason were enrolled, including elective and nonelective cases. <b><i>Results:</i></b> One-hundred eighty-nine patients were included. All BAL specimens were negative for SARS-CoV-2 indicative of 100% concordance between testing modalities. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> These results are promising and suggest that preoperative nasopharyngeal SARS-CoV-2 testing provides adequate screening to rule out active COVID-19 infection prior to OR cases in a population characterized as low risk by negative symptom screening. This information can be used for both pre-procedural screening and when reintroducing trainees into the workforce.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tzipi Braun ◽  
Shiraz Halevi ◽  
Rotem Hadar ◽  
Gilate Efroni ◽  
Efrat Glick Saar ◽  
...  

AbstractThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread around the world, impacting the lives of many individuals. Growing evidence suggests that the nasopharyngeal and respiratory tract microbiome are influenced by various health and disease conditions, including the presence and the severity of different viral disease. To evaluate the potential interactions between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the nasopharyngeal microbiome. Microbial composition of nasopharyngeal swab samples submitted to the clinical microbiology lab for suspected SARS-CoV-2 infections was assessed using 16S amplicon sequencing. The study included a total of 55 nasopharyngeal samples from 33 subjects, with longitudinal sampling available for 12 out of the 33 subjects. 21 of the 33 subjects had at least one positive COVID-19 PCR results as determined by the clinical microbiology lab. Inter-personal variation was the strongest factor explaining > 75% of the microbial variation, irrespective of the SARS-CoV-2 status. No significant effect of SARS-CoV-2 on the nasopharyngeal microbial community was observed using multiple analysis methods. These results indicate that unlike some other viruses, for which an effect on the microbial composition was noted, SARS-CoV-2 does not have a strong effect on the nasopharynx microbial habitants.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Umar Saeed ◽  
Sara Rizwan Uppal ◽  
Zahra Zahid Piracha ◽  
Azhar Rasheed ◽  
Zubair Aftab ◽  
...  

AbstractRapid diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 during pandemic enables timely treatment and prevention of COVID-19. Evaluating the accuracy and reliability of rapid diagnostic testing kits is crucial for surveillance and diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infections in general population, injection drug users, multi-transfused populations, healthcare workers, prisoners, barbers and other high risk populations. The aim of this study was to evaluate performance and effectiveness of nasopharyngeal swab (NSP) and saliva based rapid antigen detection testing kits in comparison with USFDA approved triple target gold standard real-time polymerase chain reaction. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 33,000 COVID-19 suspected patients. From RT-PCR positive patients, nasopharyngeal swab (NSP) and saliva samples were obtained for evaluation of rapid COVID-19 testing kits (RDT). 100/33,000 (0.3%) of specimens were RT-PCR positive for SARS-CoV-2. Among RT-PCR positive, 62% were males, 34% were females, and 4% were children. The NSP-RDT (Lepu Medical China) analysis revealed 53% reactivity among males, 58% reactivity among females, and 25% reactivity among children. However saliva based RDT (Lepu Medical China) analysis showed 21% reactivity among males and 23% among females, and no reactivity in children. False negative results were significantly more pronounced in saliva based RDT as compared to NSP-RDT. The sensitivity of these NSP-RDT and saliva based RDT were 52% and 21% respectively. The RDTs evaluated in this study showed limited sensitivities in comparison to gold standard RT-PCR, indicating that there is a dire need in Pakistan for development of suitable testing to improve accurate COVID-19 diagnosis in line with national demands.


Author(s):  
Rachel J. Crellin ◽  
Oliver J.T. Harris

In this paper we argue that to understand the difference Posthumanism makes to the relationship between archaeology, agency and ontology, several misconceptions need to be corrected. First, we emphasize that Posthumanism is multiple, with different elements, meaning any critique needs to be carefully targeted. The approach we advocate is a specifically Deleuzian and explicitly feminist approach to Posthumanism. Second, we examine the status of agency within Posthumanism and suggest that we may be better off thinking about affect. Third, we explore how the approach we advocate treats difference in new ways, not as a question of lack, or as difference ‘from’, but rather as a productive force in the world. Finally, we explore how Posthumanism allows us to re-position the role of the human in archaeology,


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