A Review of COVID-19 Initial Response Systems and A Proposal to Adjust the Operation of Residential treatment centers

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a periodic shortage of quarantine beds, medical personnel, and medical equipment in South Korea. Asthe pandemic is expected to continue, a need existsto readjust the capacities of residentialtreatment centersfor asymptomatic ormild cases. Thisstudy aimed to identify howother countriestreat asymptomatic or have mild COVID-19 patients, and suggest a effective operation plan of residential treatment centers.Methods: A literature review was conducted to examine how policies on asymptomatic or mild COVID-19 cases have changed at different phases of the pandemic in different countries. A reviewwas also conducted on the epidemiological characteristics of Korean patients, including clinicalstatus and treatment period, and public opinion on residential treatment centers. A plan to improve how residential treatment centers operate during the pandemic was derived based on expert advice, and discussion within the research team.Results: Home care is being recommended for asymptomatic or mild cases of COVID-19 in many countries. In Korea, despite the increase in the number of newly confirmed cases, fatality rate of COVID-19 shows a decreasing and vaccination rate an increasing trend. Three-fourths of the public recognized that home care may be more appropriate for asymptomatic or mild cases. Assuch,we recommend a reduction in length ofstay in residential treatment centers, from 10 to 3 or 5 days, and ensuring patient’s participation in decision‒making of hospitalization.Conclusions: A need existsto prepare a systematic response system, including patient education, virtual treatment and transfersystem in orderto shorten patients’ admission period in residential treatment centers and expand home care. A functioning emergency response system should also be prepared concurrently.

COVID-19 Crisis Management: Lessons From the United Arab Emirates Leaders

This study analyses the UAE leadership's approach in response to the COVID-19 crisis through the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Strategic Crisis Management Framework. This framework analyzes the crisis management in three phases: the preparedness, the response to mitigate damage and the feedback mechanism after the crisis. The analysis showed that the key components of the UAE's crisis management included efficient and able governance, integrated utilization of public-private partnerships and a global workforce of excellence. As a result, the UAE now ranks among the top 10 countries worldwide for its leadership and proactive approach during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Global Response to Infectious Diseases Index. The SWOT analysis on the response toward COVID-19 crisis management helped in critically analyzing and understanding the UAE's unified and systematic response to the pandemic, which provides developing and developed countries alike a new high standard for leadership and effective public health management.

‘I Wouldn’t Call the Cops if I was Being Bashed to Death’: Sex Work, Whore Stigma and the Criminal Legal System

Discourse on sex work is replete with narratives of risk and danger, predominantly focused on violence and disease. However, the risks instigated by police, maintained by the criminal justice system and sanctioned by the state—criminal laws, licensing laws and targeted policing—receive far less attention. This paper responds to this gap in three ways. First, we examine how stigma manifests in sex workers’ experiences of Australian policing, which act to disincentivise sex workers from accessing criminal legal mechanisms. Second, we illustrate how sex workers are denied victim status as they are seen by law as ‘irresponsible citizens’ and blamed for their experiences of crime. Third, we argue that these factors create conditions in which sex workers must constantly assess risks to access safety and legal redress while structural sex work stigma persists unabated. We conclude that ‘whore stigma’ is entrenched in the criminal legal system and requires a systematic response that necessitates but goes beyond the decriminalisation of sex work.

An Electromagnetic Energy Harvester of Large-scale Bistable Motion by Application of Stochastic Resonance

Vibrational energy harvesting has attracted considerable research attention for electrical power collection from ambient vibrations. Thereby, this study firstly developed an electromagnetic energy harvester of large-scale bistable motion by application of stochastic resonance, to enhance energy harvesting efficiency at a broadly low frequency. The electromagnetic energy harvester is fabricated by a magnet-coil generator and an oblique-supported spring-mass system. In the beginning, a weighting function is originally proposed considering mutual position relationship of the magnet and coil, and a motion equation and an electromagnetic induction equation are simultaneously established considering both elastic spring recovery force and electromagnetic induction Lorentz force. Subsequently, numerical analysis is processed to resolve the simultaneous equations to obtain systematic response displacement and the induced voltage, and the numerical solutions are accurately consistent with the measuring results in validation experiments. Furthermore, a damping coefficient is identified considering the mutual effectiveness of the damping forces from the normal friction and electromagnetic induction, and the influence of electromagnetic induction damping on systematic response displacement is carefully discussed. Eventually, experimental results clarified that the stochastic resonance phenomenon actually occurred as a large-scale bistable motion, and it is further validated that power generation efficiency can be noticeably enhanced following amplitude amplifications of systematic response displacement.

Mass Casualty Incident Management for Resource-Limited Settings: Lessons From Central Haiti

Objective: Mass casualty incidents (MCIs) have gained increasing attention in recent years due multiple high-profile events. MCI preparedness improves the outcomes of trauma victims, both in the hospital and prehospital settings. Yet most MCI protocols are designed for high-income countries, even though the burden of mass casualty incidents is greater in low-resource settings. Results: Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais (HUM), a 300-bed academic teaching hospital in central Haiti, developed MCI protocols in an iterative process after a large MCI in 2014. Frequent MCIs from road traffic collisions allowed protocol refinement over time. HUM’s protocols outline communication plans, triage, schematics for reorganization of the emergency department, clear delineation of human resources, patient identification systems, supply chain solutions, and security measures for MCIs. Given limited resources, protocol components are all low-cost or cost-neutral. Unique adaptations include the use of 1) social messaging for communication, 2) mass casualty carts for rapid deployment of supplies, and 3) stickers for patient identification, templated orders, and communication between providers. Conclusion: These low-cost solutions facilitate a systematic response to MCIs in a resource-limited environment and help providers focus on patient care. These interventions were well received by staff and are a potential model for other hospitals in similar settings.

Controlling social desirability bias: An experimental investigation of the extended crosswise model

Indirect questioning techniques such as the crosswise model aim to control for socially desirable responding in surveys on sensitive personal attributes. Recently, the extended crosswise model has been proposed as an improvement over the original crosswise model. It offers all of the advantages of the original crosswise model while also enabling the detection of systematic response biases. We applied the extended crosswise model to a new sensitive attribute, campus islamophobia, and present the first experimental investigation including an extended crosswise model, and a direct questioning control condition, respectively. In a paper-pencil questionnaire, we surveyed 1,361 German university students using either a direct question or the extended crosswise model. We found that the extended crosswise model provided a good model fit, indicating no systematic response bias and allowing for a pooling of the data of both groups of the extended crosswise model. Moreover, the extended crosswise model yielded significantly higher estimates of campus Islamophobia than a direct question. This result could either indicate that the extended crosswise model was successful in controlling for social desirability, or that response biases such as false positives or careless responding have inflated the estimate, which cannot be decided on the basis of the available data. Our findings highlight the importance of detecting response biases in surveys implementing indirect questioning techniques.

Large-scale dissociations between views of objects, scenes, and reachable-scale environments in visual cortex

Space-related processing recruits a network of brain regions separate from those recruited in object processing. This dissociation has largely been explored by contrasting views of navigable-scale spaces to views of close-up, isolated objects. However, in naturalistic visual experience, we encounter spaces intermediate to these extremes, like the tops of desks and kitchen counters, which are not navigable but typically contain multiple objects. How are such reachable-scale views represented in the brain? In three human functional neuroimaging experiments, we find evidence for a large-scale dissociation of reachable-scale views from both navigable scene views and close-up object views. Three brain regions were identified that showed a systematic response preference to reachable views, located in the posterior collateral sulcus, the inferior parietal sulcus, and superior parietal lobule. Subsequent analyses suggest that these three regions may be especially sensitive to the presence of multiple objects. Further, in all classic scene and object regions, reachable-scale views dissociated from both objects and scenes with an intermediate response magnitude. Taken together, these results establish that reachable-scale environments have a distinct representational signature from both scene and object views in visual cortex.

Management of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention Complications

Complications of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) may have significant impact on patient survival and healthcare costs. PCI procedural complexity and patient risk are increasing, and operators must be prepared to recognize and treat complications, such as perforations, dissections, hemodynamic collapse, no-reflow, and entrapped equipment. Unfortunately, few resources exist to train operators in PCI complication management. Uncertainty regarding complication management could contribute to the undertreatment of patients with high-complexity coronary disease. We, therefore, coordinated the Learning From Complications: How to Be a Better Interventionalist courses to disseminate the collective experience of high-volume PCI operators with extensive experience in chronic total occlusion and high-risk PCI. From these conferences in 2018 and 2019, we developed algorithms that emphasize early recognition, effective treatment, and team-based care of PCI complications. We think that an algorithmic approach will result in a logical and systematic response to life-threatening complications. This construct may be useful for operators who plan to perform complex PCI procedures.