Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Public Health Impact Of Paxlovid Covid-19 Treatment In The United States, Yuan Bai, Zhanwei Du, Lin Wang, Eric H. Y. Lau, Isaac Fung, Petter Holme, Ben Cowling, Alison Galvani, Robert Krug, Lauren Ancel Meyers

Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences Faculty Publications

The antiviral drug Paxlovid has been shown to rapidly reduce viral load. Coupled with vaccination, timely administration of safe and effective antivirals could provide a path towards managing COVID-19 without restrictive non-pharmaceutical measures. Here, we estimate the population-level impacts of expanding treatment with Paxlovid in the US using a multi-scale mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission that incorporates the within-host viral load dynamics of the Omicron variant. We find that, under a low transmission scenario (Re∼1.2) treating 20% of symptomatic cases would be life and cost saving, leading to an estimated 0.26 (95% CrI: 0.03, 0.59) million hospitalizations averted, 30.61 (95% …

Institute For Global Health And Development : Issue 5 - July 2023, Institute For Global Health And Development

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Observational Study Of Organisational Responses Of 17 Us Hospitals Over The First Year Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Esther K. Choo, Matthew Strehlow, Marina Del Rios, Evrim Oral, Ruth Pobee, Andrew Nugent, Stephen Lim, Christian Hext, Sarah Newhall, Diana Ko, Srihari V. Chari, Amy Wilson, Joshua J. Baugh, David Callaway, Mucio Kit Delgado, Zoe Glick, Christian J. Graulty, Nicholas Hall, Abdusebur Jemal, Madhav Kc, Aditya Mahadevan, Milap Mehta, Andrew C. Meltzer, Dar'ya Pozhidayeva, Daniel Resnick-Ault

School of Public Health Faculty Publications

Objectives The COVID-19 pandemic has required significant modifications of hospital care. The objective of this study was to examine the operational approaches taken by US hospitals over time in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Design, setting and participants This was a prospective observational study of 17 geographically diverse US hospitals from February 2020 to February 2021. Outcomes and analysis We identified 42 potential pandemic-related strategies and obtained week-to-week data about their use. We calculated descriptive statistics for use of each strategy and plotted percent uptake and weeks used. We assessed the relationship between strategy use and hospital type, geographic region …

Online Dashboards For Sars-Cov-2 Wastewater Data Need Standard Best Practices: An Environmental Health Communication Agenda, Colleen C. Naughton, Rochelle H. Holm, Nancy J. Lin, Brooklyn P. James, Ted Smith

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the benefits of wastewater surveillance to supplement clinical data. Numerous online information dashboards have been rapidly, and typically independently, developed to communicate environmental surveillance data to public health officials and the public. In this study, we review dashboards presenting SARS-CoV-2 wastewater data and propose a path toward harmonization and improved risk communication. A list of 127 dashboards representing 27 countries was compiled. The variability was high and encompassed aspects including the graphics used for data presentation (e.g., line/bar graphs, maps, and tables), log versus linear scale, and 96 separate ways of labeling SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentrations. …

A Pharmacoepidemiological Study Of Myocarditis And Pericarditis Following The First Dose Of Mrna Covid-19 Vaccine In Europe, Joana Tome, Logan Cowan, Isaac Fung

Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences Faculty Publications

This study assessed the myocarditis and pericarditis reporting rate of the first dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in Europe. Myocarditis and pericarditis data pertinent to mRNA COVID19 vaccines (1 January 2021–11 February 2022) from EudraVigilance database were combined with European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)’s vaccination tracker data. The reporting rate was expressed as events (occurring within 28 days of the first dose) per 1 million individuals vaccinated. An observed-to-expected (OE) analysis quantified excess risk for myocarditis or pericarditis following the first mRNA COVID-19 vaccination. The reporting rate of myocarditis per 1 million individuals vaccinated was 17.27 (95% …

The Compound Risk Of Heat And Covid-19 In New York City: Riskscapes, Physical And Social Factors, And Interventions, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Juan Camilo Osorio, Natasha Stamler, Maria Dombrov, Rose Winer, Mary Hannah Smith, Reginald Blake, Cynthia Rosenzweig

Publications and Research

Climate change is disrupting the fundamental conditions of human life and exacerbating existing inequity by placing further burdens on communities that are already vulnerable. Risk exposure varies by where people live and work. In this article, we examine the spatial overlap of the compound risks of COVID-19 and extreme heat in New York City. We assess the relationship between socio-demographic and natural, built and social environmental characteristics, and the spatial correspondence of COVID-19 daily case rates across three pandemic waves. We use these data to create a compound risk index combining heat, COVID-19, density and social vulnerability. Our findings demonstrate …

Prevalence Of Sars-Cov-2 Antibodies In Liberty University Student Population, Emily Bonus

Senior Honors Theses

In 2020, the virus SARS-CoV-2 gained attention as it spread around the world. Its antibodies are poorly understood, and little research focuses on those with few COVID-19 complications yet large numbers of close contacts: university students. This longitudinal study recorded SARS-CoV-2 antibody presence in 107 undergraduate Liberty University students twice during early 2021. After extensive data cleaning and the application of various statistical tests and ANOVAs, the data seems to show that in the case of COVID-19 infections, SARS-CoV-2 IgM antibodies are immediately produced, and then IgG antibodies follow later. However, the COVID-19 vaccine causes the production of both IgM …

Virtual And In Vitro Screening Of Natural Products Identifies Indole And Benzene Derivatives As Inhibitors Of Sars-Cov-2 Main Protease (MPro), Dony Ang, Riley Kendall, Hagop S. Atamian

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

The rapid spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) resulted in serious health, social, and economic consequences. While the development of effective vaccines substantially reduced the severity of symptoms and the associated deaths, we still urgently need effective drugs to further reduce the number of casualties associated with SARS-CoV-2 infections. Machine learning methods both improved and sped up all the different stages of the drug discovery processes by performing complex analyses with enormous datasets. Natural products (NPs) have been used for treating diseases and infections for thousands of years and represent a valuable resource for drug discovery when combined with …

Sustainable Management Of Facemask Waste Generated From Covid-19 Pandemic In Bhutan, Tshering Yangdon, Twisuk Punpeng, Sirima Mongkolosomit, Kampol Nanthapong, Kinzang Yangden

Journal of Health Research

Background: The rise in facemask waste with the uncertainty of deposition data and all its concomitant pressure on management has resulted in new risks and challenges for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs). The purpose of this mixed methods study was to estimate facemask waste generation and examine management in Bhutan since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: One thousand five hundred and twenty-seventh (1,527) consenting members of the public from Class A Thromdes (self-governing municipalities) were surveyed online from February to April 2022, to estimate mask waste using descriptive statistics. This was supported by the waste characterization conducted in Memelhakha, the biggest …

Modeling The Spread Of Covid-19 In Spatio-Temporal Context, S.H. Sathish Indika, Norou Diawara, Hueiwang Anna Jeng, Bridget D. Giles, Dilini S.K. Gamage

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

This study aims to use data provided by the Virginia Department of Public Health to illustrate the changes in trends of the total cases in COVID-19 since they were first recorded in the state. Each of the 93 counties in the state has its COVID-19 dashboard to help inform decision makers and the public of spatial and temporal counts of total cases. Our analysis shows the differences in the relative spread between the counties and compares the evolution in time using Bayesian conditional autoregressive framework. The models are built under the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method and Moran spatial correlations. …

Public Ownership And The Wto In A Post Covid-19 Era: From Trade Disputes To A 'Social' Function, Paolo Davide Farah, Davide Zoppolato

Articles

Public ownership is closely bound to the need of the government to protect and guarantee the well-being of its citizens. Where the market cannot, or does not want to, provide goods and services, the State uses different tools to intervene, influence, and control some aspects of the private sphere of expression of its citizens in the name and interest of the collectivity. Although, in the past century, this behavior was accepted as one of the expressions of the public authority and part of the social contract, this perception has shifted partially in accordance with the wave of privatization programs initiated …

Predictors Of Covid-19 Vaccination Rate In Usa: A Machine Learning Approach, Syed M. I. Osman, Ahmed Sabit

WCBT Faculty Publications

In this study, we examine state-level features and policies that are most important in achieving a threshold level vaccination rate to curve the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ CHAID, a decision tree algorithm, on three different model specifications to answer this question based on a dataset that includes all the states in the United States. Workplace travel emerges as the most important predictor; however, the governors’ political affiliation (PA) replaces it in a more conservative feature set that includes economic features and the growth rate of COVID-19 cases. We also employ several alternative algorithms as a robustness check. …

Association Between The Health Belief Model, Exercise, And Nutrition Behaviors During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Keagan Kiely, Bill Mase, Andrew R. Hansen, Jessica S. Schwind

Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences Faculty Publications

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our nation’s health further than the infection it causes. Physical activity levels and dietary intake have suffered while individuals grapple with the changes in behavior to reduce viral transmission. With unique nuances regarding the access to physical activity and nutrition during the pandemic, the constructs of Health Belief Model (HBM) may present themselves differently in nutrition and exercise behaviors compared to precautions implemented to reduce viral transmission studied in previous research. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent of exercise and nutritional behavior change during the COVID-19 pandemic and explain the …

Cov-Inception: Covid-19 Detection Tool Using Chest X-Ray, Aswini Thota, Ololade Awodipe, Rashmi Patel

SMU Data Science Review

Since the pandemic started, researchers have been trying to find a way to detect COVID-19 which is a cost-effective, fast, and reliable way to keep the economy viable and running. This research details how chest X-ray radiography can be utilized to detect the infection. This can be for implementation in Airports, Schools, and places of business. Currently, Chest imaging is not a first-line test for COVID-19 due to low diagnostic accuracy and confounding with other viral pneumonia. Different pre-trained algorithms were fine-tuned and applied to the images to train the model and the best model obtained was fine-tuned InceptionV3 model …

Wastewater-Informed Public Health Intervention Playbook

Sustain Magazine

As the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic quickly spread from country to country and continent to continent in 2020, governments and scientists needed a way to track COVID-19 through populations in order to position public health interventions in the most impactful locations. Having a decision-based risk framework may help to guide policy creation that could minimize or prevent possible outbreaks and surges of infection within communities. The University of Louisville in partnership with Louisville’s Department of Public Health and Wellness tested this strategy in 2021 and 2022. This Wastewater-Informed Public Health Intervention Playbook describes the decisions and actions of that academic and public …

Quantifying The Relationship Between Sub-Population Wastewater Samples And Community-Wide Sars-Cov-2 Seroprevalence, Ted Smith, Rochelle H. Holm, Rachel J. Keith, Alok R. Amraotkar, Chance R. Alvarado, Krzysztof Banecki, Boseung Choi, Ian Santisteban, Adrienne M. Bushau-Sprinkle, Kathleen T. Kitterman, Joshua Fuqua, Krystal T. Hamorsky, Kenneth E. Palmer, J. Michael Brick, Aruni Bhatnagar, Grzegorz A. Rempala

Faculty Scholarship

Robust epidemiological models relating wastewater to community disease prevalence are lacking. Assessments of SARS-CoV-2 infection rates have relied primarily on convenience sampling, which does not provide reliable estimates of community disease prevalence due to inherent biases. This study conducted serial stratified randomized samplings to estimate the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in 3717 participants and obtained weekly samples of community wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in Jefferson County, KY (USA) from August 2020 to February 2021. Using an expanded Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model, the longitudinal estimates of the disease prevalence were obtained and compared with the wastewater concentrations using regression analysis. The model analysis …

Statistical Analysis Methods Applied To Early Outpatient Covid-19 Treatment Case Series Data, Eleftherios Gkioulekas, Peter A. Mccullough, Vladimir Zelenko

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

When confronted with a public health emergency, significant innovative treatment protocols can sometimes be discovered by medical doctors at the front lines based on repurposed medications. We propose a statistical framework for analyzing the case series of patients treated with such new protocols, that enables a comparison with our prior knowledge of expected outcomes, in the absence of treatment. The goal of the proposed methodology is not to provide a precise measurement of treatment efficacy, but to establish the existence of treatment efficacy, in order to facilitate the binary decision of whether the treatment protocol should be adopted on an …

Could Cultures Determine The Course Of Epidemics And Explain Waves Of Covid-19?, Md Salman Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is an infectious disease that quickly became a pandemic spreading with different patterns in each country. Travel bans, lockdowns, social distancing, and non-essential business closures caused significant economic disruptions and stalled growth worldwide in the pandemic’s first year. In almost every country, public health officials forced and/or encouraged Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) such as contact tracing, social distancing, masks, and quarantine. Human behavioral decision-making regarding social isolation significantly impedes global success in containing the pandemic. This thesis focuses on human behaviors and cultures related to the decision-making of social isolation during the pandemic. …

Institute For Global Health And Development : Issue 4 - July - Sept 2022, Institute For Global Health And Development

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Three Dimensional Spatio-Temporal Cluster Analysis Of Sars-Cov-2 Infections, Keith W. Allison

Masters Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the need for fine-scale analysis of the clustering of cases of infectious disease in order to better understand and prevent the localized spread of infection. The students living on the University of Massachusetts, Amherst campus provided a unique opportunity to do so, due to frequent mandatory testing during the 2020-2021 academic year, and dense living conditions. The South-West dormitory area is of particular interest due to its extremely high population density, housing around half of students living on campus during normal conditions. Using data gathered by the Public Health Promotion Center (PHPC), we analyzed the …

Communicative Strategies For Building Public Confidence In Data Governance: Analyzing Singapore's Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Initiatives, Gordon Kuo Siong Tan, Sun Sun Lim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Effective social data governance rests on a bedrock of social support. Without securing trust from the populace whose information is being collected, analyzed, and deployed, policies on which such data are based will be undermined by a lack of public confidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization and datafication by governments for the purposes of contact tracing and epidemiological investigation. However, concerns about surveillance and data privacy have stunted the adoption of such contact-tracing initiatives. This commentary analyzes Singapore's contact-tracing initiative to uncover the reasons for public resistance and efforts by the state to address them. The government's contact-tracing program …

Exploring The Spatial Distribution Of Air Pollutants And Covid-19 Death Rate: A Case Study For Los Angeles County, California, Akhil Mandalapu, Junfeng Jiao, Amin Azimian

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Objective

Since March 2020, COVID-19 has rapidly spread across the world with over 240 million cases and over 5 million deaths as of November 2021. It has been unclear what role air pollutants may play in exacerbating respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 due to their interaction with the respiratory system. The association with air pollutants and COVID-19 severity has been explored at the regional and metropolitan area, however it is unclear if such an association is consistent at the neighborhood level.

Methods

Weekly death rates from COVID-19 from March 2020 to November 2021 were compared using one-sided unpaired t-tests across …

Design And Development Of The Urban Population Health Observatory To Improve Disease Surveillance And Response, Whitney Brakefield

Doctoral Dissertations

Chronic and infectious diseases have a profound impact on the quality and length of life of populations that suffer from these conditions. Scientists, physicians, and health officials are seeking innovative approaches to decrease the morbidity and mortality of deadly diseases. Incorporating artificial intelligence and data science techniques across the health science domain could improve disease surveillance, intervention planning, and policymaking. In this dissertation, we describe the design and development of the Urban Population Health Observatory (UPHO), an explainable knowledge-based multimodal big data analytics platform. A common challenge for conducting multimodal big data analytics is integrating multidimensional heterogeneous data sources, which …

An Application Of Matrices To The Spread Of The Covid 19, Selena Suarez

Theses and Dissertations

We represented a restaurant seating arrangement using matrices by using 0 entry for someone without covid and 1 entry for someone with covid. Using the matrices we found the best seating arrangements to lessen the spread of covid. We also investigated if there was a factor needed to create a formula that could calculate the matrix that shows who would be affected with covid with each seating arrangement. However, there did not seem to be a clear pattern within the factors. Aside from covid applications, we also investigated the symmetries in seating arrangements and the possible combinations with these arrangements …

On Efficacy And Effectiveness Of Vaccines: A Mathematical Approach Based On Conditional Probability With Applications To The Covid-19 Context, Flavius Guias

Spora: A Journal of Biomathematics

This paper presents a mathematically formalized approach which points out the relation between efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines. The first term denotes the relative degree of protection in clinical trials or under ideal conditions, while the latter is based on observed real-life data. We define the efficacy by a similar formula to the effectiveness, but the probabilities involved in the relative risk are conditional with respect to the exposure to the virus. If exposure and vaccination status are independent, the two quantities are equal. Otherwise, the observed value of the effectiveness is a biased one, as it could be seen …

Decision-Analytic Models Using Reinforcement Learning To Inform Dynamic Sequential Decisions In Public Policy, Seyedeh Nazanin Khatami

Doctoral Dissertations

We developed decision-analytic models specifically suited for long-term sequential decision-making in the context of large-scale dynamic stochastic systems, focusing on public policy investment decisions. We found that while machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms provide the most suitable frameworks for such analyses, multiple challenges arise in its successful adaptation. We address three specific challenges in two public sectors, public health and climate policy, through the following three essays. In Essay I, we developed a reinforcement learning (RL) model to identify optimal sequence of testing and retention-in-care interventions to inform the national strategic plan “Ending the HIV Epidemic in the US”. …

Exploring And Evaluating The Impact Of Covid-19 On Mobility Changes In Singapore, Aldy Gunawan, Linh Chi Tran, Kar Way Tan, I-Lin Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper analyzes the changes in mobility trends due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore in the six different sectors: Retail and Recreation, Grocery and Pharmacy, Parks, Transit Stations, Workplaces and Residential. The period of observation is from 15 February 2020 to 18 August 2021. The observed patterns obtained from the descriptive data analysis sheds light on the effectiveness of social distancing measures in Singapore as well as the level of compliance among the country’s residents. Correlation analysis is used to explore the relationship between different sectors during the pandemic period. The results reveal a strong sense …

A Deep Dive Into The Impact Of Covid-19 On Software Development, Paulo Anselmo Da Mota Silveira Neto, Umme Ayda Mannan, Eduardo Santana De Almeida, Nachiappan Nagappan, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Cuiyun Gao, Iftekhar Ahmed

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most crucial global health calamity of the century. It has impacted different business sectors around the world and software development is not an exception. This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on software projects and software development professionals. We conducted a mining software repository study based on 100 GitHub projects developed in Java using ten different metrics. Next, we surveyed 279 software development professionals for better understanding the impact of COVID-19 on daily activities and wellbeing. We identified 12 observations related to productivity, code quality, and wellbeing. Our findings highlight that the impact …

Using A Stochastic Continuous-Time Markov Chain Model To Examine Alternative Timing And Duration Of The Covid-19 Lockdown In Kuwait: What Can Be Done Now?, Mustafa Al-Zoughool, Tamer Oraby, Harri Vainio, Janvier Gasana, Joseph C. Longenecker, Walid Al Ali, Mohammad Alseaidan, Susie Elsaadany, Michael G. Tyshenko

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background

Kuwait had its first COVID-19 in late February, and until October 6, 2020 it recorded 108,268 cases and 632 deaths. Despite implementing one of the strictest control measures-including a three-week complete lockdown, there was no sign of a declining epidemic curve. The objective of the current analyses is to determine, hypothetically, the optimal timing and duration of a full lockdown in Kuwait that would result in controlling new infections and lead to a substantial reduction in case hospitalizations.

Methods

The analysis was conducted using a stochastic Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC), eight state model that depicts the disease transmission and …

An Odd-Protocol For Agent-Based Model For The Spread Of Covid-19 In Ireland, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Reports

No abstract provided.