Bringing up a family and making ends meet: before and during the COVID-19 crisis

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation During the Coronavirus Crisis: Important Updates for the Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia Community

BackgroundWhen a new or re-emergent pathogen, such as SARS-CoV-2, causes a major outbreak, rapid access to pertinent research findings is crucial for planning strategies and decision making. We researched whether the speed of sharing research results in the COVID-19 epidemic was higher than the SARS and Ebola epidemics. We also researched whether there is any difference in the most frequent topics investigated before and after the COVID-19, SARS, and Ebola epidemics started.MethodsWe used PubMed database search tools to determine the time-period it took for the number of articles to rise after the epidemics started and the most frequent topics assigned to the articles.ResultsThe main results were, first, the rise in the number of articles occurred 6 weeks after the COVID-19 epidemic started whereas, this rise occurred 4 months after the SARS and 7 months after the Ebola epidemics started. Second, etiology, statistics & numerical data, and epidemiology were the three most frequent topics investigated in the COVID-19 epidemic. However, etiology, microbiology, and genetics in the SARS epidemic, and statistics & numerical data, epidemiology, and prevention & control in the Ebola epidemic were more frequently studied compared with other topics. Third, some topics were studied more frequently after the epidemics started.ConclusionsThe speed of sharing results in the COVID-19 epidemic was much higher than the SARS and Ebola epidemics, and that there is a difference in the most frequent articles’ topics investigated in these three epidemics. Due to the value of time in controlling epidemics spread, the study highlights the necessity of defining more solutions for rapidly providing pertinent research findings in fighting against the next public health emergency.

The article is devoted to the study of the experience of change management for sustainable business development in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis in Russia and France. It uses a sample of 94 publicly traded French healthcare companies in 2021 to model change management for sustainable business development in France during the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis. Based on OECD and WIPO statistics for 2019-2021 and the trend analysis method monitors the practical experience of change management for sustainable business development in Russia and France in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis. Based on the 2020-2021 survey materials. the case experience of Russian business in managing change in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis is being studied. The contribution of the article to the literature is to identify, using the example of Russia and France, a new (alternative) - socially-oriented approach to managing changes in business, based on corporate social responsibility.

The motivation for this research was to strive towards specifying the risks for businesses under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis in the IT sector in Russia. This paper is aimed at performing a dataset analysis of the risks for Russian IT companies amid the COVID-19 crisis. The sample contains the top 100 largest IT companies in Russia in 2020 and covers the data on these companies for 2019–2020. The influence of the COVID-19 crisis pandemic on the risks for IT companies in Russia is assessed with the help of the authors’ methodological approach to the dataset analytics of companies’ risks with the use of the method of trend analysis, analysis of variance and the hierarchical synthesis concept by T. Saaty. A specific feature of the authors’ methodological approach is its taking into account of the pre-crisis level of risks for companies. Due to this, the authors’ methodological approach allows for the most precise and correct determination of the scale and character of the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis on the risks for companies. The role of human resources in the management of risks for IT companies under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis in Russia is determined with the help of regression analysis; the regularity of the change in revenue, and the position of the company in the ranking (its competitiveness) in terms of the growth of the number of employees, are described mathematically. The key conclusions are that the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis on the risks for IT companies in Russia in 2020 was weak, and human resources played an important role in risk management. The theoretical significance of the paper lies in its rethinking of human resources management of Russian IT companies from the position of risk amid the COVID-19 crisis. The practical significance of the authors’ conclusions lies in the discovery of the high risk resilience of Russian IT companies to the pandemic and the formation of their risk profile amid the COVID-19 crisis, in which the main, though low, risk is the risk of reduction in competitiveness, whilst the risk of reduction in revenue is minimal.

The COVID-19 crisis is unique in that it is caused by a pandemic and has created a special context for entrepreneurship in 2020. The motivation for this study is, firstly, to concretise and accurately quantify the impacts of the pandemic on entrepreneurship. Secondly, to clearly identify the specific business risks emerging or intensifying in the context of the pandemic; and thirdly, to distinguish between the impact of the economic crisis and the pandemic on entrepreneurship. This paper aims at studying the risks of entrepreneurship amid the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis. The paper’s sample consists of the top 10 countries that are leaders by the COVID-19 case rate in the world, starting 22 October 2020 up to 22 February 2022. The method of trend analysis is used to find and quantitatively measure the manifestations of the pandemic (case rate and mortality) on the entrepreneurial risks. Economic and mathematical modelling, with the help of correlation and regression analysis, showed that healthcare factors—the COVID-19 case rate and mortality—are not the key reasons for high entrepreneurial risks in 2020 and have a small influence on them. This paper’s contribution to the literature consists in specifying the cause-and-effect links between the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis and entrepreneurial risks. The theoretical significance of the results obtained consists in their proving the uniqueness of the COVID-19 crisis from the position of entrepreneurial risks. The paper’s originality consists in specifying the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurial risks, explaining—thoroughly and in detail—the essence of these risks, and opening possibilities for highly-effective risk management.

Critical Care During the Coronavirus Crisis: Challenges and Considerations for the Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia Community

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant threats to both the physical and psychological health of healthcare workers working in the front-line combating COVID-19. However, studies regarding the medium to long term impact of COVID-19 on mental health among healthcare workers are limited. Therefore, we conducted this cross-sectional survey to investigate the prevalence, factors and impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19 8 months after the end of the outbreak in Wuhan, China.MethodsA web-based questionnaire was delivered as a link via the communication application WeChat to those healthcare workers who worked at several COVID-19 units during the outbreak (from December 2019 to April 2020) in Wuhan, China. The questionnaire included questions on social-demographic data, the post-traumatic stress disorder checklist-5 (PCL-5), the family care index questionnaire (Adaptation, Partnership, Growth, Affection and Resolve, APGAR), and the quality-of-life scale (QOL). The prevalence, risk and protective factors, and impact of PTSD on healthcare workers were subsequently analyzed.ResultsAmong the 659 participants, 90 healthcare workers were still suffering from PTSD 8 months after the end of the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, in which avoidance and negative impact were the most affected dimensions. Suffering from chronic disease, experiencing social isolation, and job dissatisfaction came up as independent risk factors for PTSD, while obtaining COVID-19 related information at an appropriate frequency, good family function, and working in well-prepared mobile cabin hospitals served as protective factors. The impact of PTSD on COVID-19 exposed healthcare workers was apparent by shortened sleeping time, feeling of loneliness, poorer quality of life and intention to resign.ConclusionsEight months after the end of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the level of PTSD in healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19 was still high. Apart from the commonly recognized risk factors, comorbid chronic disease was identified as a new independent risk factor for developing PTSD. For countries where the pandemic is still ongoing or in case of future outbreaks of new communicable diseases, this study may contribute to preventing cases of PTSD in healthcare workers exposed to infectious diseases under such circumstances.

From Hendra to Wuhan: what has been learned in responding to emerging zoonotic viruses

This chapter provides a critical review of the digital gap and how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted on the digital gap globally, with particular focus on developing countries. It begins by providing a comprehensive overview of the emerging trends and nature of the digital divide in the 21st century. It then details the COVID-19 crisis and the paradigm shift to a ‘new normal’, with a highlight on the technology in use and digital gap in the ‘new normal’. It examines the ex-ante and ex-post inequalities of opportunity in relation to the digital economy amid the COVID-19 shock; barriers to digital application amid COVID-19 and related crises; and the prospects for and roadmap to digital application for sustainable development. It identifies critical issues on how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted on the digital gap both globally and in developing countries. While the chapter highlights the digital gap from a global perspective, there is a particular focus on African countries. The outbreak of COVID-19 has exposed the underlying socio-economic problem of inequality of opportunities, which have further widened and deepened the digital gap across the social and economic spectrum. Despite various interventions by government and non-governmental agencies to mitigate the impacts, barriers to digital application still exist, especially in Africa and in the developing world in general. This requires bold and coordinated action by governments as well as private industrial partnerships to achieve digital inclusion and sustainable development.

Background: Universities were abruptly obliged to move to e-learning as a result of the Corona pandemic, and the University of Tripoli's College of Nursing was one among such institutions. From there, the research came to show the reality of using e-learning in the College of Nursing at the University of Tripoli, Libya. Under these circumstances. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the academic achievement of second semester nursing students in the faculty of nursing before and during the Corona pandemic. Method: Using the quantitative comparative research design with all population sampling, a total of 148 nursing students were utilized as the sample. 88 of which were allotted before Corona pandemic while samples of 60 during the Corona pandemic. Data were collected from the college study and exams office, which were the final grade of the selected course in the second semester of the academic year 2019-2020 and the first semester of the academic year 2020-2021. The collected data were statistically analyzed using SPSS version 24, with t-test used to compare the effect of e-learning on student achievement in Fundamentals of Nursing 2 course (NU113) during the Corona pandemic to that of face-to-face learning prior to the Corona pandemic. Results: The results revealed that the average academic achievement scores for students before the Corona pandemic with face-to-face education was 56.76 and that the average academic achievement scores for students during the Corona pandemic with e-learning was 56.23. Significance levels were set at α≤ 0.05 was considered as statistically significant for all analyses of comparison between student scores before and during the Corona pandemic. The results showed that there is no statistically significant difference in academic achievement between students who studied e-learning and face-to-face education, with (p=0.868 > α). Ho is accepted, which means that the transition to e-learning rather than face-to-face education had no negative impact on academic achievement, it was found that nursing students academic achievement is not negatively affected by the Corona pandemic. Conclusion: In this way, e-learning can be harnessed and developed to advance the nursing education agenda. Further study is recommended to assess the impact of e-learning on students’ academic achievement on other courses.

Background: The Corona-virus (COVID-19) outbreak in China in 2019 can cause psychological traumatic reaction; it can be a risk factor for illness anxiety. The predictors of severe illness anxiety have not yet been explored. Methods: The present research was a cross-sectional study. The Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) was used to evaluate stress reaction, and Whiteley Index-7 (WI-7) was applied to measure illness anxiety. Participants with scores above the median WI-7 score were categorized as severe illness anxiety and those with scores lower than the median WI-7 score were categorized as non-severe illness anxiety. Logistic regression was used to calculate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI). Stress level was divided into mild, moderate, and severe, which were included in the logistic model to estimate the association of stress and illness anxiety. Results: After adjusting for covariates, the OR of mild, moderate, and severe stress reaction level was 3.32 (95% CI: 2.21, 4.99), 6.01 (95% CI: 2.99, 12.05), and 14.54 (95% CI: 7.99, 26.47), respectively. The P for trend was less than 0.001 across the levels of stress reaction. Conclusion: Severe stress reaction has been associated with severe illness anxiety during the outbreak of COVID-19 in China. The corona crisis intensifies the experience of personal stress that in turn increases the fear of the COVID-19 illness in China. Further qualitative and follow-up studies are essential to illustrate the development of illness anxiety.

BackgroundThe SARS-COV-2 virus and its variants pose extraordinary challenges for public health worldwide. Timely and accurate forecasting of the COVID-19 epidemic is key to sustaining interventions and policies and efficient resource allocation. Internet-based data sources have shown great potential to supplement traditional infectious disease surveillance, and the combination of different Internet-based data sources has shown greater power to enhance epidemic forecasting accuracy than using a single Internet-based data source. However, existing methods incorporating multiple Internet-based data sources only used real-time data from these sources as exogenous inputs but did not take all the historical data into account. Moreover, the predictive power of different Internet-based data sources in providing early warning for COVID-19 outbreaks has not been fully explored.ObjectiveThe main aim of our study is to explore whether combining real-time and historical data from multiple Internet-based sources could improve the COVID-19 forecasting accuracy over the existing baseline models. A secondary aim is to explore the COVID-19 forecasting timeliness based on different Internet-based data sources.MethodsWe first used core terms and symptom-related keyword-based methods to extract COVID-19–related Internet-based data from December 21, 2019, to February 29, 2020. The Internet-based data we explored included 90,493,912 online news articles, 37,401,900 microblogs, and all the Baidu search query data during that period. We then proposed an autoregressive model with exogenous inputs, incorporating real-time and historical data from multiple Internet-based sources. Our proposed model was compared with baseline models, and all the models were tested during the first wave of COVID-19 epidemics in Hubei province and the rest of mainland China separately. We also used lagged Pearson correlations for COVID-19 forecasting timeliness analysis.ResultsOur proposed model achieved the highest accuracy in all 5 accuracy measures, compared with all the baseline models of both Hubei province and the rest of mainland China. In mainland China, except for Hubei, the COVID-19 epidemic forecasting accuracy differences between our proposed model (model i) and all the other baseline models were statistically significant (model 1, t198=–8.722, P<.001; model 2, t198=–5.000, P<.001, model 3, t198=–1.882, P=.06; model 4, t198=–4.644, P<.001; model 5, t198=–4.488, P<.001). In Hubei province, our proposed model's forecasting accuracy improved significantly compared with the baseline model using historical new confirmed COVID-19 case counts only (model 1, t198=–1.732, P=.09). Our results also showed that Internet-based sources could provide a 2- to 6-day earlier warning for COVID-19 outbreaks.ConclusionsOur approach incorporating real-time and historical data from multiple Internet-based sources could improve forecasting accuracy for epidemics of COVID-19 and its variants, which may help improve public health agencies' interventions and resource allocation in mitigating and controlling new waves of COVID-19 or other relevant epidemics.

Background/Aims To quantify the risk of death among people with vasculitis during the UK 2020 COVID-19 epidemic compared with baseline risk, risk during annual influenza seasons and risk of death in the general population during COVID-19. Methods We performed a cohort study using data from the National Congenital Anomaly and Rare Disease Registration Service (NCARDRS) under their legal permissions (CAG 10-02(d)/2015). Coded diagnoses for vasculitis (ANCA-associated vasculitis, Takayasu arteritis, Behçet's disease, and giant cell arteritis) were identified from Hospital Episode Statistics from 2003 onwards. Previous coding validation work demonstrated a positive predictive value >85%. The main outcome measure was age-standardised mortality rates (ASMRs) for all-cause death. ONS published data were used for general population mortality rates. Results We identified 55,110 people with vasculitis (median age 74.9 (IQR 64.1-82.7) years, 68.0% female) alive 01 March 2020. During March-April 2020, 892 (1.6%) died of any cause. The crude mortality rate was 9773.0 (95% CI 9152.3-10,435.9) per 100,000 person-years. The ASMR was 2567.5 per 100,000 person-years, compared to 1361.1 (1353.6-1368.7) in the general population (see table).The ASMR in March-April 2020 was 1.4 times higher than the mean ASMR for March-April 2015-2019 (1965.6). The increase in deaths during March-April 2020 occurred at a younger age than in the general population.We went on to investige the effect of previous influenza seasons. The 2014/15 season saw the greatest excess all-cause mortality nationally in recent years, and there were 624 deaths in 38,888 people (6472.5 person-years) with vasculitis in our data (crude mortality rate 9640.8 (8913.3-10427.7); The ASMR was 2657.6, which was marginally higher than the ASMR among people with vasculitis recorded during March-April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion People with vasculitis are at increased risk of death during circulating COVID-19 and influenza epidemics. The ASMR among people with vasculitis was high both during the 2014/15 influenza season and during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic. COVID-19 vaccination and annual influenza vaccination for people with vasculitis are both important, regardless of patient age. Disclosure M. Rutter: None. P.C. Lanyon: Grants/research support; PCL has received funding for research from Vifor Pharma.. M.J. Grainge: None. R.B. Hubbard: None. E.J. Peach: Grants/research support; EJP has received funding for research from Vifor Pharma. M. Bythell: None. J. Aston: None. S. Stevens: None. F.A. Pearce: Grants/research support; FAP has received funding for research from Vifor Pharma..

This paper examines how the digital financial infrastructure that emerged in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis is being tested and leveraged to meet some of the financial, economic and health challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The origins of the 2008 crisis and the current crisis are different: the 2008 crisis was a financial crisis that spilt over into the real economy, while COVID-19 is a health and geopolitical crisis spilling over into the real economy. As such, COVID-19 – a pandemic and an existential sustainability crisis – requires different approaches. This paper explores the role of digital finance in this context on two levels. At the macro level, it identifies how digital finance has been used to address areas of systemic risk and underpin wider financial stability. At the micro level, it illustrates how digital financial tools can address a range of emerging challenges particularly relating to recovery. COVID-19 experiences are driving forward a range of efforts to build better infrastructure to address future crises, in particular interoperable electronic payments systems (including central bank digital currencies and other forms of sovereign digital currency), sovereign digital identification (particularly in the context of market integrity and non face-to-face transactions), and use of technology for regulatory, supervisory and compliance purposes, At the same time, we argue that digitization generally and of finance in particular driven by the COVID-19 crisis – while providing effective tools to support the response – have also raised new challenges, particularly around forms of TechRisk arising from control and use of data from both state and non-state actors. Looking forward, these are among the most significant challenges for policy, law and regulation in the 2020s.

Purpose This study aims to explore the impact of strategic agility on strategic orientation and its dimensions (retrenchment, perseverance, innovation and exit strategies) in Jordanian medical and pharmaceutical industries companies during the COVID-19 crisis. Design/methodology/approach The researchers relied on a descriptive-analytic methodology. The study population consisted of 23 companies in the medical and pharmaceutical industries in Amman, Jordan. The sampling units were the top managers of these companies, represented by chief executive officers and main department managers. The sample size was 193. Questionnaires were distributed to collect the data, while the valid for analysis were 165 questionnaires. Findings The results showed that strategic agility has a positive effect on strategic orientation, as well as on, perseverance, and innovation strategies, but it has an opposite effect on retrenchment strategy. However, it has no statistically significant effect on the exit strategy. Originality/value This pioneering study is uniquely valuable through filling a gap in the literature by examining the dynamic relationship between strategic agility and strategic orientation, offering practical insights for decision-makers to enhance resilience that contributes to overcoming the COVID-19 and future crises.