scholarly journals A STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF WORK FROM HOME ON EMPLOYEES DURING COVID-19 LOCKDOWN 2020

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devas Boban ◽  
Arun A.G. ◽  
Jeffine J. Joseph ◽  
Suhaina Saif

COVID 19 pandemic has taken over the world by surprise, affecting around 4 million of the world population. This unprecedented crisis of the 21st century has led to many world nations having to declare a nation-wide lockdown and prohibit all economical and commercial activities in designated spaces. Most of the corporates, in the wake of this challenge, announced work from home for their staff. This study aims to analyze the impact of work from home on employees during the COVID 19 lockdown. Building on the existing scenario of work from home, the study explores the physical, social, psychological, and financial effects of work from home among the employees. In this context, employees are defined as any person, employed in the private sector and public sector, who are currently undergoing work from home. Based on the review of literature on studies related to work from home and pandemic lockdowns, an online questionnaire was distributed to respondents across India. They were asked a set of questions, which clearly intends to collect enough information to frame a logical research output. 165 working professionals participated in the study. Analysis of the responses indicated that work from home has been associated with increased stress and lethargy, in comparison with work from the office. The results demonstrate that work from home does have a detrimental impact on the employees. On this basis, it is recommended that organizations should develop and implement a work from home policy, with positive considerations to employee wellbeing and motivation. Further research is also suggested, to identify other factors which could contribute to developing an efficient and effective work from home culture.

Author(s):  
Giovanni Gabutti ◽  
Erica d’Anchera ◽  
Francesco De Motoli ◽  
Marta Savio ◽  
Armando Stefanati

Starting from December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 has forcefully entered our lives and profoundly changed all the habits of the world population. The COVID-19 pandemic has violently impacted the European continent, first involving only some European countries, Italy in particular, and then spreading to all member states, albeit in different ways and times. The ways SARS-CoV-2 spreads are still partly unknown; to quantify and adequately respond to the pandemic, various parameters and reporting systems have been introduced at national and European levels to promptly recognize the most alarming epidemiological situations and therefore limit the impact of the virus on the health of the population. The relevant key points to implement adequate measures to face the epidemic include identifying the population groups most involved in terms of morbidity and mortality, identifying the events mostly related to the spreading of the virus and recognizing the various viral mutations. The main objective of this work is to summarize the epidemiological situation of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and Italy almost a year after the first reported case in our continent. The secondary objectives include the definition of the epidemiological parameters used to monitor the epidemic, the explanation of superspreading events and the description of how the epidemic has impacted on health and social structures, with a particular focus on Italy.


Nutrients ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1197
Author(s):  
Luana Izzo ◽  
Antonio Santonastaso ◽  
Gaetano Cotticelli ◽  
Alessandro Federico ◽  
Severina Pacifico ◽  
...  

The World Health Organization has declared the coronavirus outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern; the outbreak has led to lockdowns in several parts of the world, and sudden changes in people’s lifestyles. This study explores the impact of the first coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic period on dietary habits, lifestyle changes, and adherence to the Mediterranean diet among the Italian population, through an online questionnaire, conducted from April to May 2020, involving 1519 participants. The 14-point Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener (MEDAS) highlighted a medium Mediterranean diet adherence in 73.5% of responders, which principally included the younger population, aged 18–30 years (p < 0.05). In regards to changes in eating habits, 33.5% of responders declared an influence of the pandemic period on nutritional practice. A decrease in alcohol consumption was reported by 81% of responders, while an increase in frozen food consumption was reported by 81.3% of responders. In addition, 58.8% reported positive weight modification (40.8%, +1–3 kg); physical activity reduction was reported for 70.5% of responders. Our study contributes toward amplifying the investigation on the dietary habits and changes of the Italian population during the COVID-19 lockdown, although the pandemic is ongoing. Similar studies should be performed around the world to understand how the emergency has impacted people’s habits.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naeem Abas ◽  
Esmat Kalair ◽  
Saad Dilshad ◽  
Nasrullah Khan

PurposeThe authors present the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on community lifelines. The state machinery has several departments to secure essential lifelines during disasters and epidemics. Many countries have formed national disaster management authorities to deal with manmade and natural disasters. Typical lifelines include food, water, safety and security, continuity of services, medicines and healthcare equipment, gas, oil and electricity supplies, telecommunication services, transportation means and education system. Supply chain systems are often affected by disasters, which should have alternative sources and routes. Doctors, nurses and medics are front-line soldiers against diseases during pandemics.Design/methodology/approachThe COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how much we all are connected yet unprepared for natural disasters. Political leaders prioritize infrastructures, education but overlook the health sector. During the recent pandemic, developed countries faced more mortalities, fatalities and casualties than developing countries. This work surveys the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, energy, environment, industry, education and food supply lines.FindingsThe COVID-19 pandemic caused 7% reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during global lockdowns. In addition, COVID-19 has affected social fabric, behaviors, cultures and official routines. Around 2.84 bn doses have been administrated, with approximately 806 m people (10.3% of the world population) are fully vaccinated around the world to date. Most developed vaccines are being evaluated for new variants like alpha, beta, gamma, epsilons and delta first detected in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, USA and India. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all sectors in society, yet this paper critically reviews the impact of COVID-19 on health and energy lifelines.Practical implicationsThis paper critically reviews the health and energy lifelines during pandemic COVID-19 and explains how these essential services were interrupted.Originality/valueThis paper critically reviews the health and energy lifelines during pandemic COVID-19 and explains how these essential services were interrupted.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. e30510212535
Author(s):  
Gabriel Kiaro Leite Nunes ◽  
Karinne Alice Santos de Araújo ◽  
Thais Ranielle Souza de Oliveira ◽  
Marcelina da Conceição Botelho Teixeira ◽  
Ieler Ferreira Ribeiro ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about major changes in the lifestyle of the world population. Due to the lack of vaccines or a definitive treatment for disease, governments around the world have adopted social isolation and quarantine as methods to control the spread of the virus. Objective: Thus, the objective of this study was to discuss how social isolation and quarantine periods affected people's mental health and quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: An integrative literature review was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic between March and September 2020, establishing the following guiding question: How did social isolation and quarantine affect the mental health and quality of life of the population in the COVID-19 pandemic? Results: The final sample consisted of nineteen (19) articles, two (2) addressed depression during the pandemic period, three (3) presented the pandemic and the relationship with sociodemographic aspects, five (5) analyzed mental health in the pandemic, four (4) reported the impact of COVID-19 on the population's style and quality of life and the last five (5) demonstrated the quality of human relationships and emotional aspects in the face of the pandemic. Conclusion: It was demonstrated that isolation and the quarantine period had a negative impact on the population's quality of life and long-term mental health.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charvi Pareek ◽  
Nandani Agarwal ◽  
Yash Jain

COVID-19 Pandemic has brought the world underwaters. All over the world, people were affected. The focus during this period was mostly on patients and frontline workers, with some attention also towards working adults. One cohort that has not gained much light during this pandemic is of housewives. Housewives had to manage household chores along with managing family relations – especially in India, where societal expectations lie on the female to provide family members with care and manage the household. Dealing with uncertainty, decreased availability of personal space, increased presence of and interaction with people in the household due to work from home scenarios, shifting to the online world and adapting to the change, economic disturbances, absence of domestic help, managing parental responsibility, increased stress about one’s own and family members’ health and lack of social interaction have contributed to their inconvenience. Existing evidence supports that housewives have been experiencing burnout in their homes. This qualitative study was conducted to see how the added pressure of COVID – 19 and social isolation has affected housewives mentally, leading to burnout. This narrative study includes participants of Indian origin, between the ages of 34 to 50 years. Participants were shortlisted on the basis of their scores obtained on the COVID-19 Burnout Scale, designed by Murat Yıldırım and Fatma Solmaz. The themes generated through this research study are related to understanding the impact of burnout on the mental health of housewives along the areas of physical health, financial well-being, digitization, uncertainty regarding COVID-19, parental responsibilities, social & emotional health, relationship management, and coping mechanisms. The findings of this study suggest that the mental health of housewives has significantly worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic due to constant exposure to certain stressors.


Author(s):  
Diane Ashiru-Oredope ◽  
◽  
Amy Hai Yan Chan ◽  
Omotayo Olaoye ◽  
Victoria Rutter ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The declaration of COVID-19 a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020 marked the beginning of a global health crisis of an unprecedented nature and scale. The approach taken by countries across the world varied widely, however, the delivery of frontline healthcare was consistently recognised as being central to the pandemic response. This study aimed to identify and explore the issues currently facing pharmacy teams across Commonwealth countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also evaluates pharmacy professionals’ understanding of key knowledge areas from the COVID-19 webinar hosted by the Commonwealth Pharmacists’ Association (CPA). Method A quantitative survey-based approach was adopted, using a 32-item questionnaire developed from the literature on pharmacy and pandemic response. The survey was hosted on Survey Monkey and pilot tested. The final survey was disseminated by CPA member organisations. A 6-item online questionnaire was sent via email to all attendees of CPA's COVID-19 webinar. Descriptive statistics on frequency distributions and percentages were used to analyse the responses. Data were analysed using Microsoft® Excel (2010). Results There were 545 responses from pharmacy professionals across 31/54 Commonwealth countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific. Majority of the respondents reported being at least somewhat worried (90%) and more than 65% were very worried or extremely about the impact of COVID-19 on them personally and professionally. Nearly two-thirds of respondents stated finding it somewhat difficult or very difficult to work effectively during the pandemic. Challenges mostly faced by pharmacy professionals working remotely included; general anxiety about the impact of COVID-19 on their lives (12%), and difficulties in communicating with their co-workers (12%). Most pharmacy professionals had not previously been actively involved in a global health emergency (82%) nor obtained training on global/public health emergency preparedness (62%). Between 45 and 97% of the COVID-19 webinar attendees provided the correct answers to post-webinar questions, suggesting some improvement in knowledge. Conclusion Our study confirms pharmacy professionals’ concerns about practice during a pandemic and provides preliminary data on the challenges and learning needs of the profession. The CPA has since acted on these findings, providing ongoing opportunities to develop and refine resources for the profession as the pandemic evolves. Pharmacy professionals have also demonstrated improved knowledge on the management of COVID-19 and resources available for professionals.


This century took on the formidable task of educating its majorities; a task that the unprecedented levels of world population rendered all the more formidable and yet all the more essential. As the world faces this deeply felt need and faces up to this still far from completed task, it recognizes at the same time the extraordinary developments that have taken place in the arts, and the technology, of broadcast communications. The title of this meeting draws attention to one quite remarkable step forward in technology: the geostationary satellite; a satellite in an orbit of just that radius (40000 km) which makes its period the length of the day so that it can remain always over one point of the rotating Earth. Modern technologies have expanded the answer to the age-old question ‘who is my neighbour?’ and the geostationary satellite has extended the natural concept of neighbourhood as bounded by the horizon of line-of-sight vision and increased by more than two orders of magnitude the distance of effective line-of-sight communication. For many years now able people all over the world have been considering the impact that this technological development, and all the other developments in the technologies and the arts of broadcast communication, can have on the world’s need to educate its majorities. The problems are different in different parts of the world, and different countries will come to different conclusions on the educational pros and cons and the technological pros and cons of different approaches to the solutions of the problems.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Rodrigo Zárate-Bladés ◽  
Celio Lopes Silva ◽  
Geraldo A. Passos

In 1882 Robert Koch identifiedMycobacterium tuberculosisas the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), a disease as ancient as humanity. Although there has been more than 125 years of scientific effort aimed at understanding the disease, serious problems in TB persist that contribute to the estimated 1/3 of the world population infected with this pathogen. Nonetheless, during the first decade of the 21st century, there were new advances in the fight against TB. The development of high-throughput technologies is one of the major contributors to this advance, because it allows for a global vision of the biological phenomenon. This paper analyzes how transcriptomics are supporting the translation of basic research into therapies by resolving three key issues in the fight against TB: (a) the discovery of biomarkers, (b) the explanation of the variability of protection conferred by BCG vaccination, and (c) the development of new immunotherapeutic strategies to treat TB.


Author(s):  
Lesya Sheludko

Actuality of the research topic. A number of global trends affects food supply and consumption, as well as food security in the world. The main one is the growth of the world population primarily in emerging countries and urbanization of the population. Accordingly, the topic of food security in the context of urbanization becomes highly relevant. Problem statement. It should be noted, that urbanization changes the quantity and structure of food products, increases the demand for quality products, impacts on food security and economic security of the country in general. Review of recent research and publications. Urbanization is a very complex subject; so many well-known foreign and domestic scientists from different fields of science have studied various aspects of urbanization. At the same time, the vast majority of publications are mostly theoretical and cover the demographic and geographical aspects of urban processes, while the issues of economic analysis and the impact of urbanization on food security remain inadequately studied. Task statement, research methods. The article aims to study the process of urbanization in the world and in Ukraine, as well as to identify the impact of urban processes on the economic development of countries and food security in order to develop recommendations on prospects and opportunities for Ukraine. Presentation of the main material (results of work). The paper describes the main processes of urbanization, which take place in different countries and in the world as a whole, as well as in Ukraine. The influence of urbanization processes on the economic development of the countries is determined, namely, that the countries with high level of urbanization have high economic development and accordingly the high Gross National Product per capita. It has been discovered, that urbanization also affects the food security of countries, as the number of urban population increases, the structure of consumer products changes, and the demand for food increases as well. Summary. Urbanization represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the development of agriculture, as well as food security. Urbanization provides opportunities for Ukraine in the face of growing demand for food, to improve its export potential.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiran Yadav

Objective: Evaluate the trend of dietary convergence in the world. How specifically do Indian and Chinese diets have changed and middle-class consumption and evaluate their dietary trend? Methodology: The paper analyses the diet patter of India and China from 1990 to 2019. The paper is particularly keen to analyse the impact of income, urbanization and proportion of the young population on diet pattern. The data of food balance for these two countries is taken from FAOSTAT. To measure the income effect, the GNP per capita data is taken from World Bank. The population and urbanization data is taken from UN world population prospects 2019 and UN world urbanization prospects 2018. The linear regression model is used to analyse the impact of socio-economic factors. Results: The analysis has found that rise in income is positively associated with the macronutrients diet for Indians particularly for carbohydrates consumption whereas for Chinese the reverse is true. The study found that urbanization of the population is highly positively associated with the consumption of carbohydrates diet for Chinese whereas, for India, urbanization is negatively associated with fat consumption. The change in young age population negatively impacts the fat consumption for China while positively impact the consumption of carbohydrates for Indians.Conclusion: The gap between dietary pattern is found to be reduced globally. Consumption of many food groups shows convergence for a different region. The consumption of macronutrients between India and China from 1990 to 2019 shows the converging trend in the early 1990s but after that, it shows divergence. In both countries, socio-economic factors push more toward carbohydrates diets.


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