Overall Number Of People Research Articles

National eye health data from the Hungary's Comprehensive Health Protection Screening Program 2010–2020–2030 (MÁESZ)

AbstractPurposeThis paper provides a detailed presentation of the estimated number of people in Hungary with eye disease and refractive errors by both sex and age.Materials/methodsIn the past 12 years, 168,522 people (54.1% women and 45.9% men) have been screened under Hungary's Comprehensive Health Protection Screening Programme (MÁESZ).ResultsThe total number of people with eye disease in the adult Hungarian population (about 8 million people) is estimated to be 1,684,818, with women (1,078,026) outnumbering men (606,792). Eye diseases were found to be more common in older age groups, and more common in women than men in each age group. The estimated number of people with refractive errors in the Hungarian adult population is 5,005,095. The overall number of people with myopia in the adult Hungarian population is estimated to be 3,058,536, with roughly equal numbers of men and women. The majority of people with myopia (63.3%) are between 18 and 45 years of age.ConclusionsThe huge number of people in the Hungarian population affected by eye disease or refractive errors underscores the need to develop and implement an effective national strategy and specific programmes to prevent visual impairments.

Различия между показателями самоактуализационных характеристик, толерантности к неопределенности и метакогнитивных навыков у работающих юношей и девушек

The paper is concerned with the comparative study of indicators of self-actualization characteristics, tolerance to uncertainty and metacognitive skills in working young boys and girls. The sample comprised 116 young men and 84 young women aged 18 to 22 years. The overall number of people under study is 200 people working in the fields of law, creativity, engineering, architecture, management, IT, medicine, etc. Significant differences between the indicators of 17 personality attributes of working girls and boys were obtained. Working boys eval-uate their self-actualization and cognitive qualities higher than girls, while working girls are more tolerant of uncertain situations and novelty, but are inferior to boys in making decisions amid incomplete information. Working boys are more capable than girls of identifying the essentials, actively pursuing their own goals, mak-ing quick choices, concentrating well and managing their time. The results obtained from the study are of prac-tical relevance for employers to utilize the personal potential of employees in a more constructive way.

THE IMPACT THAT SOCIAL MEDIA HAS HAD ON TODAY'S GENERATION OF INDIAN YOUTH: AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

Social media has become a daily habit in most people’s lives. People of all ages participate in social media, and the average Indian devotes nearly 2.4 hours per day to this one activity alone. People are able to voice their concerns and share their perspectives through the medium of social media. When it comes to understanding social media, people must first be comfortable with the notion. Users can communicate with one another and share information, thoughts, opinions, images, and videos via Internet-based programmes known as "social media.. In order to access content, share content with other users of that social media platform, and converse with other users of that social media platform, an individual must first sign up for an account and then sign in to that account. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snap Chat, Telegram, and LinkedIn are just a few of the most prominent and frequently used social networking platforms today; others include Snap chat etc. It's noteworthy to observe that most of these social networking sites have a disproportionately high proportion of teen users. In India, adolescents and teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 make up 31 percent of the overall number of people who use social media (Statista, 2021). Users in India between the ages of 18 and 24 make up the majority of Facebook and Instagram users in the country. We take a descriptive and analytical stance when discussing social media and its effects on young people, both good and bad, in this study. We heavily rely on the thematic analysis tool MAXQDA to draw a conclusion. We discuss all facets of social media, including both positive and bad effects. Specific areas including business, education, society, and young people are highlighted.

THE IMPACT THAT SOCIAL MEDIA HAS HAD ON TODAY'S GENERATION OF INDIAN YOUTH: AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

Social media has become a daily habit in most people’s lives. People of all ages participate in social media, and the average Indian devotes nearly 2.4 hours per day to this one activity alone. People are able to voice their concerns and share their perspectives through the medium of social media. When it comes to understanding social media, people must first be comfortable with the notion. Users can communicate with one another and share information, thoughts, opinions, images, and videos via Internet-based programmes known as "social media.. In order to access content, share content with other users of that social media platform, and converse with other users of that social media platform, an individual must first sign up for an account and then sign in to that account. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snap Chat, Telegram, and LinkedIn are just a few of the most prominent and frequently used social networking platforms today; others include Snap chat etc. It's noteworthy to observe that most of these social networking sites have a disproportionately high proportion of teen users. In India, adolescents and teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 make up 31 percent of the overall number of people who use social media (Statista, 2021). Users in India between the ages of 18 and 24 make up the majority of Facebook and Instagram users in the country. We take a descriptive and analytical stance when discussing social media and its effects on young people, both good and bad, in this study. We heavily rely on the thematic analysis tool MAXQDA to draw a conclusion. We discuss all facets of social media, including both positive and bad effects. Specific areas including business, education, society, and young people are highlighted.

Prevalence and treatment of peptic ulcer at educational Al Hussein Hospital and review of antibiotics from global sources

Infection with Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is a prevalent global infection that is a leading cause of peptic ulcer disease and stomach cancer. Determine the prevalence of H. Pylori in the province of Thi-Qar from 2017 to 2018. Data was collected utilizing a periscope on the second floor of Educationa Al Hussein Hospital's Gastroenterology Unit for patients with gastrointestinal ulcers on the basis of age, gender, housing area, and month. A survey of the therapies utilized throughout the world was performed to get information on ulcer therapy. The current study found that the number of people infected with H. pylori in 2017 was higher than the number of people infected in 2018, in both sexes, with the overall number of people infected in 2017 being higher than the total number of people infected in 2018. (250). Females between the ages of 15 and 35, living in the countryside during the month of May, had a significant frequency of H. pylori with gastric ulcer. The treatment of stomach ulcers employed in the gastrointestinal unit of the patients was positive tests for H.pylori infection.

Hepatitis C prevalence and key population size estimate updates in San Francisco: 2015 to 2019.

BackgroundIn 2017, San Francisco’s initiative to locally eliminate hepatitis C virus (HCV) as a public health threat, End Hep C SF, generated an estimate of city-wide HCV prevalence in 2015, but only incorporated limited information about population HCV treatment. Using additional data and updated methods, we aimed to update the 2015 estimate to 2019 and provide a more accurate estimate of the number of people with untreated, active HCV infection overall and in key subgroups–people who inject drugs (PWID), men who have sex with men (MSM), and low socioeconomic status transgender women (low SES TW).MethodsOur estimates are based on triangulation of data from blood bank testing records, cross-sectional and longitudinal observational studies, and published literature. We calculated subpopulation estimates based on biological sex, age and/or HCV risk group. When multiple sources of data were available for subpopulation estimates, we calculated an average using inverse variance weighting. Plausible ranges (PRs) were conservatively estimated to convey uncertainty.ResultsThe total number of people estimated to have anti-HCV antibodies in San Francisco in 2019 was 22,585 (PR:12,014–44,152), with a citywide seroprevalence of 2.6% (PR:1.4%–5.0%)–similar to the 2015 estimate of 21,758 (PR:10,274–42,067). Of all people with evidence of past or present infection, an estimated 11,582 (PR:4,864–35,094) still had untreated, active HCV infection, representing 51.3% (PR:40.5%–79.5%) of all people with anti-HCV antibodies, and 1.3% (PR:0.6%–4.0%) of all San Franciscans. PWID comprised an estimated 2.8% of the total population of San Francisco, yet 73.1% of people with anti-HCV antibodies and 90.4% (n = 10,468, PR:4,690–17,628) of untreated, active HCV infections were among PWID. MSM comprised 7.8% of the total population, yet 11.7% of people with anti-HCV antibodies and 1.0% (n = 119, PR:0–423) of those with untreated active infections. Low SES TW comprised an estimated 0.1% of the total population, yet 1.4% of people with HCV antibodies and 1.6% (n = 183, PR:130–252) of people with untreated active infections.ConclusionsDespite the above-average number (2.6%) of people with anti-HCV antibodies, we estimate that only 1.3% (PR:0.6%–4.0%) of all San Francisco residents have untreated, active HCV infection–likely a reflection of San Francisco’s robust efforts to diagnose infection among high-risk groups and initiate curative treatment with as many people as possible. While plausible ranges of infections are wide, these findings indicate that while the overall number of people with anti-HCV antibodies may have increased slightly, the number of people with active HCV infection may have decreased slightly since 2015. This estimate improves upon the 2015 calculations by directly estimating the impact of curative treatment citywide and in subgroups. However, more research is needed to better understand the burden of HCV disease among other subgroups at high risk, such as Blacks/African Americans, people with a history of injection drug use (but not injecting drugs in the last 12 months), people who are currently or formerly incarcerated, and people who are currently or formerly unhoused.

Meta-Knowledge and Multi-Task Learning-Based Multi-Scene Adaptive Crowd Counting.

In this paper, we propose a multi-scene adaptive crowd counting method based on meta-knowledge and multi-task learning. In practice, surveillance cameras are stationarily deployed in various scenes. Considering the extensibility of a surveillance system, the ideal crowd counting method should have a strong generalization capability to be deployed in unknown scenes. On the other hand, given the diversity of scenes, it should also effectively suit each scene for better performance. These two objectives are contradictory, so we propose a coarse-to-fine pipeline including meta-knowledge network and multi-task learning. Specifically, at the coarse-grained stage, we propose a generic two-stream network for all existing scenes to encode meta-knowledge especially inter-frame temporal knowledge. At the fine-grained stage, the regression of the crowd density map to the overall number of people in each scene is considered a homogeneous subtask in a multi-task framework. A robust multi-task learning algorithm is applied to effectively learn scene-specific regression parameters for existing and new scenes, which further improve the accuracy of each specific scenes. Taking advantage of multi-task learning, the proposed method can be deployed to multiple new scenes without duplicated model training. Compared with two representative methods, namely AMSNet and MAML-counting, the proposed method reduces the MAE by 10.29% and 13.48%, respectively.

The Impact that social media has had on Today's Generation of Indian Youth: An Analytical Study

Social media has become a daily habit in most people’s lives. People of all ages participate in social media, and the average Indian devotes nearly 2.4 hours per day to this one activity alone. People are able to voice their concerns and share their perspectives through the medium of social media. When it comes to understanding social media, people must first be comfortable with the notion. Users can communicate with one another and share information, thoughts, opinions, images, and videos via Internet-based programmes known as "social media.. In order to access content, share content with other users of that social media platform, and converse with other users of that social media platform, an individual must first sign up for an account and then sign in to that account. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snap Chat, Telegram, and LinkedIn are just a few of the most prominent and frequently used social networking platforms today; others include Snap chat etc. It's noteworthy to observe that most of these social networking sites have a disproportionately high proportion of teen users. In India, adolescents and teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 make up 31 percent of the overall number of people who use social media (Statista, 2021). Users in India between the ages of 18 and 24 make up the majority of Facebook and Instagram users in the country. We take a descriptive and analytical stance when discussing social media and its effects on young people, both good and bad, in this study. We heavily rely on the thematic analysis tool MAXQDA to draw a conclusion. We discuss all facets of social media, including both positive and bad effects. Specific areas including business, education, society, and young people are highlighted.

Transcriptomic and Genetic Profiling of HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorders.

Early in the HIV pandemic, it became evident that people living with HIV (PLWH) develop a wide range of neurological and neurocognitive complications. Even after the introduction of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), which dramatically improved survival of PLWH, the overall number of people living with some form of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) seemed to remain unchanged, although the incidence of dementia declined and questions about the incidence and diagnosis of the mildest form of HAND arose. To better understand this complex disease, several transcriptomic analyses have been conducted in autopsy samples, as well as in non-human primates and small animal rodent models. However, genetic studies in the HIV field have mostly focused on the genetic makeup of the immune system. Much less is known about the genetic underpinnings of HAND. Here, we provide a summary of reported transcriptomic and epigenetic changes in HAND, as well as some of the potential genetic underpinnings that have been linked to HAND, and discuss future directions with hurdles to overcome and angles that remain to be explored.

Kebijakan Migrasi dan Overstay Pada Masa Pandemi Covid-19 pada Tata Kelola Keimigrasian di Indonesia

COVID-19 has emerged in a world closely connected by local and international population movements, with more people moving for reasons of work, education and family, tourism and living than ever before. Intense population movements, particularly tourists and business workers, have been a major driver of the global spread of the outbreak. At the same time, the presence and movement of migrants1 are dynamics of the demographic, social, cultural and economic dynamics that shape the local contexts affected by the pandemic. For people and communities around the world, considering (or not) migrants in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts will affect the track of the crisis. Inclusive public health efforts will be critical to contain and mitigate outbreaks, reduce the overall number of people affected, and streamline emergency situations. Immigration policy at Indonesia's borders is a rigorous but inconsistent policy-making process with which instruments are revised and applied every month. The policy has not been designed for the Covid-19 crisis situation in Indonesia, stated by the decisive authority. This paper proposes the concept of integrated border management (IBM), the stages of policy formulation, and technology adoption.

Security Logical Subjectivity of Mental and Behavioral Disorders and their Social and Specialized Correction

The number of people who suffer from various types and forms of mental disorders is growing rapidly every day. The problem definition by the statistical methods only just outlines the quantitative relations between the numbers of registered mental illness cases and the overall number of people suffering from them. However, it doesn’t answer the main questions of the public safety and of the safety of the abovementioned persons as it fails to account for the exogenous factors of the manifestation of the genetically determined and inborn mental disorders that incapacity mostly the children population. In this regard, a necessary condition for public safety is a scientific solution to the problem of the securitylogical subjectivity of the person with mental and behavioral disorders. One of the main reasons for the heavy illnesses of the central nervous system (CNS) and psychic disorders is perinatal cerebrovascular lesions and hypoxic-ischemic cerebrovascular injuries. The problem is, on the one hand, a subject of interest for the psychological, medical and social sciences, and on the other opens the dimensions of both special and social correction. Psychic disorders resulting from the perinatal cerebrovascular lesions and their psychotherapeutic correction are discussed in this article. Clinical investigation of the perinatal cerebrovascular lesions has been conducted using radio diagnostics tools, the mental and behavioural disorders were studied, and the correction methods were presented.

IMPACT OF REMOVAL STRATEGIES OF STAY-AT-HOME ORDERS ON THE NUMBER OF COVID-19 INFECTORS AND PEOPLE LEAVING THEIR HOMES

As of November 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the world. One of the measures that has been taken to curb the spread of the virus is blanket stay-at-home orders. Staying at home significantly limits close contact with others and can, thus, decrease the number of new cases. However, if people refrain from going out, this will cause significant economic damage. For this reason, some people think that these orders should be revoked after a short period of time, and people should get out more often. However, if blanket stay-at-home restrictions are lifted before a significant decrease is seen in the number of new cases, the number of infected people is likely to increase within a short period. This will, in turn, hasten the next round of blanket stay-at-home orders and lead to a further reduction in people who can leave their home. Against this backdrop, this study examines below phenomena, through a multi-agent simulation. The early removal strategies of stay-at-home orders for increasing the number of people leaving their homes have the effect of both increasing and decreasing the number of such people. Therefore, we consider the strategies do not lead to a sufficient increase in the overall number of people leaving their homes. To examine these phenomena, we conducted the simulations that consist of six scenarios with the different removal condition of stay-at-home orders. As a result, we could confirm that when more removal conditions of stay-at-home orders were eased, the tendencies of more number of infected people and death people were increasing with some exceptions. In contrast, there were almost no differences among the numbers of people leaving their home of these scenarios. Based on the results, we also examined the possibility of a strategy that covers both infected people and the number of people allowed to leave their homes.

Targeted HIV screening in the emergency department.

Despite considerable improvement in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) knowledge and treatment in the last 3 decades, the overall number of people living with HIV (PLHIV) is still rising with up to one quarter being unaware of their HIV status. Early HIV diagnosis and treatment prolongs life, reduces transmission, improves quality of life, and is a cost-effective public health intervention. The emergency department (ED) sees a large number of patients from marginalized and traditionally underserved populations in whom HIV is known to be more prevalent and who may notattend traditional services because of either cultural reasons or because of a chaotic lifestyle. This article discusses the two main approaches to screening; 'Opt-out' screening offers testing routinely in all clinical settings, and 'Targeted' screening offers testing to individuals presenting with indicator conditions. There are many studies of 'Opt-out' ED HIV screening in urban areas of high-HIV prevalence. However, little is known about the effectiveness of 'targeted' HIV screening, especially in areas of low prevalence. This review discusses the background to HIV screening in the ED and reviews the evidence around 'targeted' HIV screening in adult EDs in different HIV prevalence settings, concluding that targeted HIV screening at the ED can be impactful, cost-effective, and well accepted in the ED population, but its long-term implementation requires extra funding and increased staffing resource limiting its application in low resource setting. Despite most evidence being from areas of high-HIV prevalence, targeted screening might also be appropriate in low-HIV prevalence areas.

The Probabability Models for Risk of Vulnerability to STDs / HIV Infections among Pre-Marital Female Migrants

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the virus that causes AIDS, while many viruses can be controlled by the immune system but not a HIV virus. According to an estimate of UNAIDS (1998) although HIV prevalence rate is low (around 1 percent), the overall number of people with HIV infection to high. The majority of the reported AIDS cases have occurred in the sexually active and economically productive age group. Earlier men were main transmitters of the disease but now studies are showing that females are also transmitting the disease to males. The proposed model is tested set of data on the number of young unmarried female migrants and is satisfactory. According to the present study, the value of X 2 =5.733 with three degree of freedom at 5% level of significance indicate that the proposed probability model fitted well to the distribution of female migrants. The estimated value of = 0.8039 of the proportion of female migrants having at least one boy friend is very high because most at the young migrants believe that their friends watch pornographic material with us and they are more vulnerable to STDs and HIV/AIDs. The present study states that the probability of closed boyfriends attached with the young unmarried female migrants is p = 0.4400 which is also approaching to fifty percent.

Cognitive reserve and resilience: Possible mechanisms of dementia prevention

AbstractBackgroundPredictions about future dementia prevalence vary but usually suggest large increases in numbers of people with dementia as the population ages. However, in some countries, for example, the US, UK and Netherlands, while overall numbers of people with dementia are growing as predicted, the age‐specific incidence rates of dementia have decreased substantially. This is probably due to educational, socio‐economic, health and lifestyle changes.MethodWe reviewed known risk factors listed in the 2017 Lancet commission: education, hypertension, hearing impairment, smoking, obesity, depression, exercise, diabetes and social contact; literature about cognitive reserve and considered effective interventions for these risks.ResultCognitive reserve is the brain resilience which allows for cognition maintenance despite neuropathological damage. Early, mid and late life factors are all important. Early‐life factors, such as education, are important for cognitive reserve and those with more education build greater cognitive reserve. Lifelong higher educational attainment also reduces dementia risk. Cognitive reserve is not static and is affected by a number of factors. Quantifying it uses proxy measures such as education, residual approaches (the variance of cognition not explained by demographic variables and brain measures) or identifying underlying brain functional. People in more cognitively demanding jobs tend to show less cognitive deterioration before, and sometimes after retirement than those in less demanding jobs. Hypertension and obesity in mid‐life are risk factors for dementia, as is hearing impairment. More frequent social contacts at age 60 years is associated with lower dementia risk over 15 years of follow‐up. Smoking in late life increases the risk of dementia. In later life people’s physical health may moderate the susceptibility to neuropathology. Those who are frail may develop Alzheimer’s disease with a lesser burden of neuropathology. Older people otherwise in good physical health can sustain a higher burden of neuropathology without cognitive impairment. There are however relatively few evidence based interventions and we will discuss what interventions we found in systematic review and what developments are still needed.ConclusionThere are clinically and economically effective interventions. It is important to consider the stage of the life course when thinking about possible effective interventions to prevent dementia.

Author’s Response

Author’s Response

COVID-19 Epidemic Situation, the Outbreak Peak and Cycle Centered on China's No-Drug Control Actions: A Modeling Study

Background: New characteristics have created significant challenges in non-drug regulation on the 2019 Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak while there are few related research articles in recent months. In view of these recent developments, a more comprehensive analysis on the role of non-drug control measures (NDC) will provide a further guide for the work on disease prevention faced with a range of changes. Methods: This paper measures and divides the intensity of the NDC into eleven tiers according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese emergency classification criteria. The paper then proposes a new model for control-measures-susceptible-exposed-infected-removed-dead (CM-SEIRD), based upon the standard susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR) model, which parameterizing the new characteristics of COVID-19 infection and NDC. The start time and intensity of implementation of the NDC were taken as variables to obtain the special impact of NDC on the COVID-19 epidemic. The theoretical study on variable discretization and continuity was carried out for the Wuhan model system. Findings: NDC can efficiently minimize deaths, minimize infection risk, and delay the outbreak peak for 1-2 months. The highest outbreak time discussed in this study was around 16-23 days. If NDC can be carried out within the time threshold and intensity level, more than 10% of the total death toll will be reduced, more than 8% of the peak infected number will be reduced, and more than 90% of the population will be able to prevent infection. In contrast to the NDC starting time, the intensity of NDC impacts the outbreak more directly and has a good impact on the overall number of people exposed, sick and dead from the beginning to the end. This study also found that it would take 23 days to clear new cases in the blocked areas based on the strength of Chinese control measures. Interpretation: Despite great pressure due to the new characteristics and situation of the COVID-19 outbreak, at this point, NDC is still the most effective prevention and control step. Different countries and regions need to implement strict NDCs as quickly as possible to contain the outbreak and to promote development and economic growth as soon as possible.Funding Statement: Guangxi University.Declaration of Interests: All authors declare no competing interests.

Exposing the tactics of alcohol companies

Abstract Background The alcohol industry has taken a page from the tobacco industry play book in an attempt to resist regulation through delay, self-regulation and effective lobbying. The global alcohol industry is constantly seeking to increase sales of harmful products through widespread marketing, the targeting of young people, and resisting regulatory action. Methods An assessment of the number of lobbyists engaged in one form of another to influence members of Parliament in Australia is being conducted to provide an insight into the attempts to influence alcohol policy. This follows a scan of the lobbyists' register by Daube et al in 2018 that found the while the tobacco industry had 20 direct lobbyists and 14 indirect, the junk food industry 33 direct and 13 indirect, the most dominant was the alcohol industry with 43 direct and 23 indirect. A careful re-examination of the register in 2020 is expected to reveal an increase in these numbers. There will also be an examination of the State and Territory registers in an attempt to understand the overall numbers of people specifically attempting to influence governments. Discussion This particular examination is focussed on the Australian Parliament/s. However, the message will be similar world-wide. Companies such as Diageo have a significant share of the world market with net sales, for example, being 25% of scotch, 16% of beer and 11% of vodka. Their “Drinkiq” website claims “Diageo is committed to preventing and reducing alcohol abuse around the world”. However, other business websites illustrate that their prime objective is to sell more alcohol. Presentation The presentation will focus on the importance of countering the efforts of industry in increasing availability of alcohol. It will also provide a series of steps that public health advocates can take in order to persuade governments of the importance of protecting community health through appropriate regulation of the marketing and sales of alcohol. Key messages The alcohol industry seeks to increase sales while arguing it is protecting health. Public health advocates do have the tools to counter approaches by alcohol companies.

Prevalence and incidence of HIV among female sex workers and their clients: modelling the potential effects of intervention in Rwanda

BackgroundRwanda has identified several targeted HIV prevention strategies, such as promotion of condom use and provision of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for female sex workers (FSWs). Given...

The COVID-19 epidemic, its mortality, and the role of non-pharmaceutical interventions.

COVID-19 has developed into a pandemic, hitting hard on our communities. As the pandemic continues to bring health and economic hardship, keeping mortality as low as possible will be the highest priority for individuals; hence governments must put in place measures to ameliorate the inevitable economic downturn. The course of an epidemic may be defined by a series of key factors. In the early stages of a new infectious disease outbreak, it is crucial to understand the transmission dynamics of the infection. The basic reproduction number (R0), which defines the mean number of secondary cases generated by one primary case when the population is largely susceptible to infection (‘totally naïve’), determines the overall number of people who are likely to be infected, or, more precisely, the area under the epidemic curve. Estimation of changes in transmission over time can provide insights into the epidemiological situation and identify whether outbreak control measures are having a measurable effect. For R0 > 1, the number infected tends to increase, and for R0 < 1, transmission dies out. Non-pharmaceutical strategies to handle the epidemic are sketched and based on current knowledge, the current situation is sketched and scenarios for the near future discussed.