Government disclosure in influencing people’s behaviors during a public health emergency

We shed light on the importance of government disclosure in public emergency management. During the outbreak of COVID-19, provinces in China entered a government disclosure regime, which mandated the disclosure of the number of people infected with the virus on a daily basis. Each province also voluntarily disclosed its own virus situation. We find that various forms of province-level government disclosure generally reduced the number of trips made by the infected and sped up their diagnosis. They also raised attention paid to the virus and self-protection awareness as well as reduced mobility among the susceptible. Finally, government voluntary disclosure helped to reduce the duration of local epidemics. We conclude that government disclosure can be effective in instilling the correct human behaviors that are conducive to fighting the pandemic.

Romania: derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights – freedom of expression during public emergency

A pandemic can provide a textbook example for the restrictions of fundamental rights and freedoms. Romania has decided to derogate from the application of the European Convention on Human Rights during the state of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The questions discussed in this paper are whether the derogation of Romania fulfils the criteria established by the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. If the answer is affirmative: does it have any effect on the inherent limitations on the freedom of expression as stated in art. 10 of ECHR?

LEVERAGING DATA MINING TECHNIQUES IN ENHANCING THE EFFICACY OF HEALTHCARE IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES: SPOTLIGHT ON TURKISH CASE STUDY

This paper presents a utilization of the information mining technique to decide the financial profiles of the public clinics in Turkey. The review depends on the information accumulated in 2004, covering 645 public clinics run by the Ministry of Health (MoH) as the fundamental supplier of essential and optional wellbeing administrations in Turkey. The public medical clinics, as of now financed by a combination of assets allotted from the overall spending plan and separately worked rotating reserves, need critical answers for their financial issues as a piece of a continuous public change exertion. The examination takes on the Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) choice tree calculation, as one of the most efficient and cutting-edge information digging technique utilized for division. The investigation has discovered that the public clinics could be sorted by the CHAID into 12 unique profiles as far as their financial execution. These profiles have directed us in deciding the key financial markers to be engaged upon in the public emergency clinics and present accepted procedures to work on their individual financial exhibitions. The findings have likewise permitted strategy ideas regarding the financial techniques that might be considered in working on the financial execution of the public medical clinics toward an effective wellbeing area change in Turkey.

Fear of COVID-19 Among Elderly Patients with a Chronic Physical or Mental Disease

Older age renders individuals vulnerable during public emergency crises. Considering that older adults are a highly heterogeneous and continuously growing demographic subgroup, this study aimed to assess the mental health impact of COVID-19 on two groups of older patients: a group of chronic physical disease and a group of chronic mental disease. A total of 102 patients completed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale, the Brief Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and several questions regarding demographic characteristics. Suicidality was assessed by the 9th item of the PHQ-9.According to the results, older chronic disease patients showed higher levels of fear, whereas anxiety and depressive symptoms were present mainly in the group of older psychiatric patients. Suicidality was reported from a subtotal of 25.4% that was composed of 7.8% chronic disease patients and 17.6% psychiatric patients. Chronic physical disease and higher anxiety predicted more severe COVID-19-related fear.

Modeling of Trusted Public Emergency Services for Smart Cities Using Blockchain and IoT-based Cognitive Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) recently gained attention from the last few years due to various smart city applications deployment. The existing literature discusses different public emergency service (PES) aspects from smart-healthcare to smart-home automation. However, less work explores for the smart-fire-brigade system. The PESs require high computation, timely service fulfillment, service transparency, and trust, which are difficult to achieve through a centralized system. In recent years, blockchain technology has gained enormous popularity for immutable data management that ensures transparency, reliability, and data integrity using distributed storage. This paper presents a blockchain based model for secure and trusted public emergency service in IoT-enabled smart cities (BMSTP) to handle the PES requests in real-time fairly. An edge compute server (ECS) is introduced to enhance data processing speed and local data storage. Simultaneously, a queuing theory model is used to process PES requests quickly. The ECS manages an access control list (ACL) for smart-home IoT devices to protect against the illegal placement of any new IoT devices near smart-home to misguiding public emergency service departments (PESDs). Further, a reputation model is designed for PESDs to scale their service quality. We explored the BMSTP for smart-homes placed under different sub-areas of a smart-city. The experiment results show the proposed system model is efficient in scheduling the smart-home PES requests to an appropriate PESD and minimizing the delay to reaching the smart-home location.