Sou Hyun Jang
Sou Hyun Jang
Institution: Department of Sociology, Korea University,
Email: soujang@korea.ac.kr
Most studies on COVID-19 preventive behaviors have focused on single-level factors such as national policy, community social capital, or individuals' sociodemographic characteristics. Through a social-ecological model, this study attempts to comprehensively examine the multilevel factors associated ...
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Most studies on COVID-19 preventive behaviors have focused on single-level factors such as national policy, community social capital, or individuals' sociodemographic characteristics. Through a social-ecological model, this study attempts to comprehensively examine the multilevel factors associated with COVID-19 preventive practices in South Korea. Accordingly, a web survey involving 1,500 participants was conducted in December 2020. An ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used to examine the multilevel factors (individual, interpersonal, community, and policy levels) related to COVID-19 preventive measures, which are based on wearing a mask, washing hands, covering the mouth when coughing or sneezing, and social distancing. When factors at each level were investigated, higher scores of COVID-19 fear and correct knowledge at the individual level, COVID-19 information share at the interpersonal level, and better evaluation of the national government policies in regard to COVID-19 at the policy level were positively associated with COVID-19 preventive behaviors. Community-level factors-neighborhood perception and community participation-were negatively significantly related to COVID-19 preventive behaviors. Additionally, older age, being female, and having a graduate-level education were positively related to better preventive behaviors. The findings of the current study suggest that multilevel efforts are needed to promote preventive behaviors. Specifically, more effort to alleviate COVID-19-related fear and disseminate correct knowledge among Korean citizens is needed as the individual-level characteristics explained the preventive behaviors more than the factors at upper levels.
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1 year ago
Aamir Jalal Al-Mosawi
Aamir Jalal Al-Mosawi
Institution: Baghdad Medical City and Iraqi Ministry of Health
Email: almosawiAJ@yahoo.com
Background: The year 2020 witnessed the rapid spread of covid-19 pandemic in Iraq and in almost all the countries in the world. This spread has created a serious health crises and a public health emergency in Iraq and throughout the world. Throughout the world, healthcare systems have been negativel...
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Background: The year 2020 witnessed the rapid spread of covid-19 pandemic in Iraq and in almost all the countries in the world. This spread has created a serious health crises and a public health emergency in Iraq and throughout the world. Throughout the world, healthcare systems have been negatively
influenced by the pandemic and experienced unexpected changes. We have previously provided several descriptions of the Iraq health care system from its evolution. However, little is known about the health care system in Iraq during the first year of the coves pandemic. The aim of this paper is provide a description of the healthcare system in Iraq during the year 2020, the first year of covid-19 global pandemic.
Materials and Methods: The available unpublished and published data about the Iraqi healthcare system during the first year of covid-19 pandemic, the
year 2020 were examined. The data included more than 100 relevant unpublished and published information documents including journal articles, books, official reports of the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Iraqi Ministry of Health. In addition, relevant useful data available at internet web sites were also
reviewed. The available relevant data were classified into categories including; demographic data relevant to healthcare, Data related to covid-19 disease in Iraq, data related to the organizational structure of the healthcare system, data related to national healthcare policies including national healthcare mission, vision, strategic goals and plans, data related to healthcare system financing, data about healthcare services delivery, data about the workforce in the Iraq
healthcare system, data related to child health and maternal, data about notifiable infectious disease, data about chronic disorders and the main causes of morbidity and mortality, and data about medical education and healthcare education. Many relevant healthcare data for three provinces (The Kurdish provinces in the north of Iraq) of the eighteen provinces in Iraq were not available in English or Arabic.
Results: The population of Iraq in 2020 was estimated at 40.150.174 (20.284.823 males and 19.865.351 females). During the year 2020, 595291 cases of
covid-19 disease were registered by the Iraqi Ministry of Health. 12813 (2.15%) patients died and 537841 (90.3%) patients experienced recovery. The organizational structure of the Iraq health system, the backbone of the Iraq healthcare system witnessed no important change from the description before
covid-19 global pandemic in 2019.
The declared mission and vision of the Iraqi Ministry of Health for the year 2020 were the same mission and vision of the Iraqi Ministry of Health that were declared in 2018. In 2020, the Iraqi Ministry of Health declared a strategic plan which included a vision and mission statements for the health information system. The first year of covid-19 pandemic in Iraq was not associated with an important increase in the number of primary healthcare centers. However, there was little increase in the number of governmental hospitals. Surprisingly, the bed occupancy rate of governmental hospitals during the first year of the
pandemic was lower than the bed occupancy rate during the two years before the pandemic. The total number of hospitalized patients in 2020 was lower than the previous four years, but the mortality rate per 1000 hospitalized patients was significantly higher in 2020 than the previous four years.
Conclusion: Covid-19 disease in Iraq was associated with a significant mortality during the year 2020. It actually changed the previously reported national mortality pattern as covid-19 has become the second most common cause of death in Iraq. Contradictory, to the general belief that mortality associated with covid-19 disease was generally restricted to the older age groups, 117 children under the age of ten years died because of covid-19 disease in 2020. This number of childhood deaths suggests the need to consider vaccination of the younger age groups and to perform the relevant research. Covid-19 disease has emerged as a new notifiable infectious disease in Iraq and throughout the world; therefore, it changed the pattern of notifiable infectious diseases in Iraq.
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1 year ago
Pooja Kherwa,
Pooja Kherwa
Institution: Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology,
Email: info@res00.com
Poonam Bansal
Poonam Bansal
Institution: Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology,
Email: info@res00.com
The COVID-19 pandemic is the deadliest outbreak in our living memory. So, it is the need of hour
to prepare the world with strategies to prevent and control the impact of the pandemic. In this paper,
a novel semantic pattern detection approach in the COVID-19 literature using contextual clusteri...
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The COVID-19 pandemic is the deadliest outbreak in our living memory. So, it is the need of hour
to prepare the world with strategies to prevent and control the impact of the pandemic. In this paper,
a novel semantic pattern detection approach in the COVID-19 literature using contextual clustering
and intelligent topic modeling is presented. For contextual clustering, three level weights at term level,
document level, and corpus level are used with latent semantic analysis. For intelligent topic modeling,
semantic collocations using pointwise mutual information (PMI), and log frequency biased mutual
dependency (LBMD) are selected, and latent dirichlet allocation is applied. Contextual clustering
with latent semantic analysis presents semantic spaces with high correlation in terms at corpus level.
Through intelligent topic modeling, topics are improved in the form of lower perplexity and highly
coherent. This research helps in finding the knowledge gap in the area of COVID-19 research and
offered direction for future research.
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1 year ago
Mohammed Mikidadu
Mohammed Mikidadu
Institution: Department of Economics & Business Administration, Austin College,
Email: mmohammed@austincollege.edu
Objectives: The study investigated the relationship between electricity access and infant mortality at the sub-
national level in Ghana, controlling for correlates such as birth interval, children living with both parents,
women’s education, and income distribution.
Methods: The study employed ...
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Objectives: The study investigated the relationship between electricity access and infant mortality at the sub-
national level in Ghana, controlling for correlates such as birth interval, children living with both parents,
women’s education, and income distribution.
Methods: The study employed a pooled cross‐section regression approach using data from the Ghana
Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS) for 10 administrative regions from 1993 to 2014. The GDHS is a
detailed data set that provides comprehensive information on households and their socio‐economic and demo-
graphic characteristics in Ghana.
Results: The results show that in regions with low incidence of infant mortality, a 10% improvement in elec-
tricity access reduces infant death by 11.8 per 1,000 live births, whereas in high mortality regions, improve-
ment in electricity access has no impact on infant death. Birth interval reduces the risk of infant death in
low mortality regions but not in high mortality regions. Children living with both parents have a high proba-
bility of survivorship in high mortality regions. Women’s median years of education lowers the likelihood of
infant death in high mortality regions but increases the likelihood in low mortality regions. Wealth distribution
is inconsequential for infant death in low mortality regions, but in high mortality regions, both the wealthiest
and the poorest experienced significant decline in infant death.
Conclusions: The findings underscore the fruitfulness of investigating the effects of electricity access and other
correlates on infant mortality at the subnational level. The study recommends that the provision of reliable
access to electricity is needed to improve infant mortality rates. However, policies that seek to improve access
to reliable electricity should be implemented together with health infrastructure development policies, espe-
cially in the regions with high infant mortality rates, for electricity access to have the desired effect
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1 year ago
