A Language-independent Network to Analyze the Impact of COVID-19 on the World via Sentiment Analysis

Towards the end of 2019, Wuhan experienced an outbreak of novel coronavirus, which soon spread worldwide, resulting in a deadly pandemic that infected millions of people around the globe. The public health agencies followed many strategies to counter the fatal virus. However, the virus severely affected the lives of the people. In this paper, we study the sentiments of people from the top five worst affected countries by the virus, namely the USA, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa. We propose a deep language-independent Multilevel Attention-based Conv-BiGRU network (MACBiG-Net) , which includes embedding layer, word-level encoded attention, and sentence-level encoded attention mechanisms to extract the positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. The network captures the subtle cues in a document by focusing on the local characteristics of text along with the past and future context information for the sentiment classification. We further develop a COVID-19 Sentiment Dataset by crawling the tweets from Twitter and applying topic modeling to extract the hidden thematic structure of the document. The classification results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 85%, which is higher than other well-known algorithms for sentiment classification. The findings show that the topics which evoked positive sentiments were related to frontline workers, entertainment, motivation, and spending quality time with family. The negative sentiments were related to socio-economic factors like racial injustice, unemployment rates, fake news, and deaths. Finally, this study provides feedback to the government and health professionals to handle future outbreaks and highlight future research directions for scientists and researchers.

Improving hospital-based processes for effective implementation of Government funded health insurance schemes: evidence from early implementation of PM-JAY in India

Background Government-sponsored health insurance schemes (GSHIS) aim to improve access to and utilization of healthcare services and offer financial protection to the population. India’s Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) is one such GSHIS. This paper aims to understand how the processes put in place to manage hospital-based transactions, from the time a beneficiary arrives at the hospital to discharge are being implemented in PM-JAY and how to improve them to strengthen the scheme’s operation. Methods Guidelines were reviewed for the processes associated with hospital-based transactions, namely, beneficiary authentication, treatment package selection, preauthorization, discharge, and claims payments. Across 14 hospitals in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh states, the above-mentioned processes were observed, and using a semi-structured interview guide fifty-three respondents were interviewed. The study was carried out from March 2019 to August 2019. Results Average turn-around time for claim reimbursement is two to six times higher than that proposed in guidelines and tender. As opposed to the guidelines, beneficiaries are incurring out-of-pocket expenditure while availing healthcare services. The training provided to the front-line workers is software-centric. Hospital-based processes are relatively more efficient in hospitals where frontline workers have a medical/paramedical/managerial background. Conclusions There is a need to broaden capacity-building efforts from enabling frontline staff to operate the scheme’s IT platform to developing the technical, managerial, and leadership skills required for them. At the hospital level, an empowered frontline worker is the key to efficient hospital-based processes. There is a need to streamline back-end processes to eliminate the causes for delay in the processing of claim payment requests. For policymakers, the most important and urgent need is to reduce out-of-pocket expenses. To that end, there is a need to both revisit and streamline the existing guidelines and ensure adherence to the guidelines.

The incidence of COVID-19 infection following emergency use authorization of BBIBP-CORV inactivated vaccine in frontline workers in the United Arab Emirates

Based on the findings from the Phase III clinical trials of inactivated SARS COV-2 Vaccine, (BBIBP-CORV) emergency use authorization (EUA) was granted for the vaccine to frontline workers in the UAE. A prospective cohort study was conducted among frontline workers to estimate the incidence rate and risk of symptomatic COVID-19 infection 14 days after the second dose of inoculation with BBIBP-CORV inactivated vaccine. Those who received two doses of the BBIBP-CORV vaccine in the period from 14th of September 2020 (first dose) to 21st of December 2020 (second dose) were followed up for COVID-19 infections. 11,322 individuals who received the two-dose BBIBP-CORV vaccine were included and were followed up post the second dose plus fourteen days. The incidence rate of symptomatic infection was 0.08 per 1000-person days (95% CI 0.07, 0.10). The estimated absolute risk of developing symptomatic infection was 0.97% (95% CI 0.77%, 1.17%). The confirmed seroconversion rate was 92.8%. There were no serious adverse events reported and no individuals suffered from severe disease. Our findings show that vaccinated individuals are likely to remain protected against symptomatic infection or becoming PCR positive for SARS COV 2 following the second dose of the vaccination.

Rapid Mobilization of Medical Student Volunteers to Administer Vaccines During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In December 2020, the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and vaccination efforts rapidly launched across the country. Concurrently, New York City experienced an increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations. This created an immediate need to inoculate frontline workers in a strained health system that lacked sufficient personnel to meet the demand. In response, New York State permitted medical students with appropriate clinical experience to administer vaccinations. Albert Einstein College of Medicine students rapidly stepped in to administer vaccines and serve as clinic navigators. Student leaders at Einstein collaborated with Montefiore Medical Center to rapidly implement a student vaccination initiative. Medical students underwent virtual and on-site training regarding COVID-19 vaccines and their administration. In January 2021, students began to staff vaccine clinics across the Bronx. By July 2021, 291 out of 830 eligible medical and Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) students (35.1%) had volunteered >2400 h. Of the 291 volunteers, 77 (26.5%) worked as vaccinators and administered approximately 2929 COVID-19 vaccines from January to May 2021. We demonstrate success using the concept of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) in the context of training medical students in a specific clinical skill. Our framework resulted in the administration of approximately 2929 COVID-19 vaccines from January to May 2021. The authors believe that this framework can be implemented at peer institutions to alleviate the burden on hospital systems and outpatient clinics vaccinating their communities against COVID-19, or to meet future clinical needs.

FaceBit

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased the use of face masks across the world. Aside from physical distancing, they are among the most effective protection for healthcare workers and the general population. Face masks are passive devices, however, and cannot alert the user in case of improper fit or mask degradation. Additionally, face masks are optimally positioned to give unique insight into some personal health metrics. Recognizing this limitation and opportunity, we present FaceBit: an open-source research platform for smart face mask applications. FaceBit's design was informed by needfinding studies with a cohort of health professionals. Small and easily secured into any face mask, FaceBit is accompanied by a mobile application that provides a user interface and facilitates research. It monitors heart rate without skin contact via ballistocardiography, respiration rate via temperature changes, and mask-fit and wear time from pressure signals, all on-device with an energy-efficient runtime system. FaceBit can harvest energy from breathing, motion, or sunlight to supplement its tiny primary cell battery that alone delivers a battery lifetime of 11 days or more. FaceBit empowers the mobile computing community to jumpstart research in smart face mask sensing and inference, and provides a sustainable, convenient form factor for health management, applicable to COVID-19 frontline workers and beyond.

Extending Evaluation Capacity Building Theory to Improvement Science Networks

Evaluation practices are continuing to evolve, particularly in those areas related to formative, participatory, and improvement approaches. Improvement science is one of the evaluative practices. Its strength is that it seeks to embrace stakeholders’ and frontline workers’ knowledge and experience, who are often tasked with leading improvement activities in their organizations. However, very little guidance exists on how to develop crucial improvement capacity. Evaluation capacity building literature has the potential to fill this gap. This multiple methods case study follows a networked improvement community’s first year in a public education setting as network leaders sought to build capacity by incorporating Preskill and Boyle’s multidisciplinary model as its guiding framework. The purpose of this study was to better understand how to build improvement science capacity, along with what facilitates implementation and beneficial learnings. This article ends by reconceptualizing and extending Preskill and Boyle’s model to improvement science networks.

Relevance of developing public health service cadres alongside a more prevention oriented Indian health system: an overview

The relevance of public health has been emphasized in the wake of the global epidemic COVID-19. There are several success stories that we often tend to forget, such as the fight against various infectious illnesses like smallpox, poliomyelitis, and current human-immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention, to name a few, public health has played a significant impact. Diarrheal diseases, for example, which contributes significantly to India's under-five mortality rate and is one of the leading causes of malnutrition, can be effectively handled by improving access to safe water and sanitation. Because public health encompasses more than just health, we require a workforce with managerial and leadership skills as well as training in public health as a specialty. This paper explores some of the successes and lessons learned from systematic investments in public health in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, namely The Tamil Nadu model and other countries, as well as the system's flaws. In India, a feasible framework for establishing dedicated public health cadres has also been explored. Evidence was acquired from PubMed, Google Scholar, newspaper stories, and publicly released government orders and papers. The recruitment of cadres may resemble that of the Indian economic/statistical services (IES/ ISS) by the UPSC. Another area to emphasize for health professionals interested in public health is training. Starting from frontline workers, block level workers to district and state we need dedicated public health workforce. Moreover, the need of the hour is to establish such a system which will work alongside pre-existing clinical fields.

Meeting the numbers: Performance politics and welfare-to-work at the street-level

Over the past decade, social policy in Ireland has taken an increasingly ‘workfarist turn’. This has proceeded through benefit cuts, tighter eligibility criteria for payments, and claimant activation via penalty rates for breaching new conduct conditions. However, key to understanding the post-crisis reconfiguration of welfare is not just the increasingly workfarist content of social policy but also how the delivery of public employment services has been reorganised through processes of marketisation and tightening performance management of delivery organisations and the staff who work within them. Positioning these governance reforms as processes of ‘double activation’, and drawing on survey and interview research with frontline staff working for agencies contracted by government to deliver activation, this study explores how frontline staff experience performance management as a disciplinary regime: the degree to which frontline workers are subject to management control and performance management in their jobs, what forms this takes, and how it shapes their field of action and choice. In so doing, the study draws attention to the ways in which the governance of caseworkers and the governance of claimants are inter-related, and the degree to which performance management regimes influence frontline practices to motivate the enforcement of workfarist policy practices.