Search

Last week, Brazil’s total death toll from COVID-19 passed 400,000. In India, the pandemic is taking around 3,500 lives every day and has prompted a global response, with offers of oxygen, ventilators, intensive-care beds and more. Although these two countries are thousands of miles apart, the crises in both are the result of political failings: their leaders have either failed or been slow to act on researchers’ advice. This has contributed to an unconscionable loss of life.

While COVID-19 has generated a massive burden of illness worldwide, healthcare workers (HCWs) have been disproportionately exposed to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection. During the so-called ‘first wave’, infection rates among this population group have ranged between 10% and 20%, raising as high as one in every four COVID-19 patients in Spain at the peak of the crisis. Now that many countries are already dealing with new waves of COVID-19 cases, a potential competition between HCW and non-HCW patients for scarce resources can still be a likely clinical scenario. In this paper, we address the question of whether HCW who become ill with COVID-19 should be prioritised in diagnostic, treatment or resource allocation protocols. We will evaluate some of the proposed arguments both in favour and against the prioritisation of HCW and also consider which clinical circumstances might warrant...

IntroductionClinical and research psychologists around the world are experiencing various challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarantine, mobility restrictions and health risks associated with the new SARS-CoV-2 virus have disrupted studies, which has impacted data collection, project coordination and monitoring efforts. Researchers have had to shift and adapt their fields of research. Consequently, various studies regarding COVID-19 have emerged. In Panama, a multidisciplinary research group, the Panama Aging Research Initiative (PARI), has been studying the characteristics associated with aging among the Panamanian population for the last 10 years. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment and assessment of elderly participants came to a halt being as they are most vulnerable to COVID-19. As the team became involved in pandemic-related studies, it faced an unfamiliar...

Abstract Due to COVID-19, many countries including Japan have implemented a suspension of economic activities for infection control. It has contributed to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 but caused severe economic losses. Today, several promising vaccines have been developed and are already being distributed in some countries. Therefore, we evaluated various vaccine and intensive countermeasure strategies with constraint of economic loss using SEIR model to obtain knowledge of how to balance economy with infection control in Japan. Our main result is that the vaccination strategy that prioritizes younger generation outperformed the other strategies in terms of deaths. On the other hand, when we focused on strategies that prioritize older generation, as Japan has decided to do, the optimal vaccination strategy was determined by the basic reproduction number and acceptable...

COVID-19 has become a global health pandemic forcing governments introducing unprecedented steps to contain the spread of the virus. On the 23rd of March, 2020, the UK government addressed the nation to announce extraordinary measures as a response to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, which have influenced the well-being and finances of millions of people. As a result people had to make difficult adjustments and to follow different coping strategies in order to respond to income losses. The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of various coping strategies, due to the lockdown measures, on the respondents’ subjective well-being by gender and ethnic background. We apply a difference-in-differences framework using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) combined with the UKHLS COVID-19 survey conducted in April 2020. Furthermore, using the Life...

Background:The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) associated with acute respiratory syndrome believed to have emanated from Wuhan, China in 2019 has led to serious implications on fertility, economic challenges and intimate partner violence (IPV) in Nigeria. The impact of the coivd-19 pandemic led to various responses by many governments around the world, aimed at reducing the spread of the disease and the unprecedented deaths that have followed. This paper examined the implications of the COVID-19 lockdown on fertility, economic and intimate partner violence in Nigeria using situation analysis study (SAS) as its design. Qualitative and quantitative data obtained through administered questionnaires using online survey monkey and focused group method was analyzed. Result:Results indicated that, although lockdown as a method adopted by governments to curtail the spread of the deadly...

The ongoing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 still poses significant health challenges globally. The Harvard group’s models predict that a resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 could occur as late as 2024 after a period of apparent elimination, if the duration of immunity is intermediate and if other corona viruses induce intermediate cross-immunity1. Among more than 60 vaccine candidates in clinical trials, currently, only the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna COVID-19, and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines have received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)2–4. The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has additionally received approval in the European countries, India, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan, Nepal, and others5. For emergency use, other vaccines like Sputnik V,...

    The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has wreaked havoc worldwide with millions of lives claimed, human travel restricted, and economic development halted. Leveraging city-level mobility and case data across mainland China, our analysis shows that the spatial dissemination of COVID-19 in mainland China can be well explained by the human migration from Wuhan and there will be very different outcomes if the COVID-19 outbreak occurred in other cities. For example, the outbreak in Beijing or Guangzhou would result in a $\sim$90% increase of COVID-19 cases at the end of the Chinese New Year holiday. After the implementation of a series of control measures, human mobility had experienced substantial changes toward containing the spread of COVID-19. Our results also suggest an inequality of economic deprivation as less developed areas generally suffered more...

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is exacerbating inequalities in the US. We build an agent-based model to elucidate the differential causal effects of nonpharmaceutical interventions on different communities and validate the results with US data. We simulate viral transmission and the consequent deterioration of economic conditions on socioeconomically disadvantaged and privileged populations. As found in data, our model shows that the trade-off between COVID-19 deaths and deaths of despair, dependent on the lockdown level, only exists in the socioeconomically disadvantaged population. Moreover, household overcrowding is a strong predictor of the infection rate. The model also yields new insights that fill in the gaps of our data analysis. While subsidisation narrows the socioeconomic gap in deaths of despair, the combination of testing and contact tracing alone is effective at...

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a spike in the unemployment rate and a decrease in the number of job openings. It is unknown whether this shock in the labor market affects different groups of job seekers equally. With the help of a correspondence study I describe the relationship between labor market conditions and ethnic labor inequality. The results provide evidence of the changes in the ethnic employment gap during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. Moreover, these changes are accompanied by fluctuations in the labor market competition.