Summary

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and the disease now affects nearly every country and region. Caused by SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 continues nearly 18 months later to present significant challenges to health systems and public health in both hemispheres, as well as the economies of every country. The morbidity and mortality of the infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 has been significant, and various waves of disease outbreaks initially overwhelmed many hospitals and clinics and continue to do so in many countries. This influences everyone, and public health countermeasures have been dramatic in terms of their impact on employment, social systems, and mental health. This entry collection aims to gather diverse fields about COVID-19, including in epidemiology, public health, medicine, genetics, systems biology, informatics, data science, engineering, sociology, anthropology, nursing, environmental studies, statistics, and psychology.

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Entries
Topic Review
Business Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility
The COVID-19 pandemic is without question posing a generation-defining challenge for public health and the global economy. Moreover, the pandemic has revived some old and introduced many new threats that today’s business leaders will have to face in the years to come. Despite the fact that the COVID-19 crisis was a humanitarian tragedy that continues to ravage millions of lives, it can also be viewed as an excellent opportunity to restart sustainable economic development as well as to help our business and economy to shift towards real business corporate social responsibility and ethical decision-making (thanks to the reduction in carbon emissions as a result of reduced economic activity and travel, increasing investments into healthcare and education, or finding the new ways for working and learning, such as remote work and online education).
  • 306
  • 11 Dec 2023
Topic Review
NETosis in Disease Condition
Ischemic thrombotic disease, characterized by the formation of obstructive blood clots within arteries or veins, is a condition associated with life-threatening events, such as stroke, myocardial infarction, deep vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism. The conventional therapeutic strategy relies on treatments with anticoagulants that unfortunately pose an inherent risk of bleeding complications. These anticoagulants primarily target clotting factors, often overlooking upstream events, including the release of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). Neutrophils are integral components of the innate immune system, traditionally known for their role in combating pathogens through NET formation. Emerging evidence has now revealed that NETs contribute to a prothrombotic milieu by promoting platelet activation, increasing thrombin generation, and providing a scaffold for clot formation.
  • 203
  • 07 Dec 2023
Topic Review
E-Learning as a Development Tool
In the modern world, there is a need to organize learning quickly and effectively. Due to the current economic climate, competition in the educational market, and demographic decline, there is an increasing interest in e-learning at all levels of education but especially in higher education. E-education provides the opportunity to attract students from abroad, those with disabilities, and those who cannot give up their professional work but want or should continue their education. This way of acquiring knowledge is of interest to various people who want to complete their higher education or gain a new profession. 
  • 247
  • 08 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Structural, Functional Changes by SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Mutations
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, has sparked intense research on its spike protein, which is essential for viral entrance into host cells. Viral reproduction and transmission, host immune response regulation, receptor recognition and host cell entrance mechanisms, as well as structural and functional effects have all been linked to mutations in the spike protein. Spike protein mutations can also result in immune evasion mechanisms that impair vaccine effectiveness and escape, and they are linked to illness severity and clinical consequences. 
  • 190
  • 01 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Digitalization of the Restaurant Industry
The COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the restaurant industry. Temporary shutdowns and seating capacity restrictions led to a sharp drop in sales. In this scenario, digitalization emerged as a crucial strategy for business survival, offering opportunities to increase restaurants’ competitiveness and revenues. 
  • 857
  • 30 Nov 2023
Topic Review
COVID-19 and Gastrointestinal Tract
Since its first report in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, COVID-19 has become a pandemic, affecting millions of people worldwide. Although the virus primarily affects the respiratory tract, gastrointestinal symptoms are also common.
  • 235
  • 30 Nov 2023
Topic Review
Healthcare Sustainability: Hospitalization Rate Forecasting
Monitoring and forecasting hospitalization rates are of essential significance to public health systems in understanding and managing overall healthcare deliveries and strategizing long-term sustainability. Early-stage prediction of hospitalization rates is crucial to meet the medical needs of numerous patients during emerging epidemic diseases such as COVID-19. Nevertheless, this is a challenging task due to insufficient data and experience. In addition, relevant existing work neglects or fails to exploit the extensive contribution of external factors such as news, policies, and geolocations. Herein, researchers demonstrate the significant relationship between hospitalization rates and COVID-19 infection cases. A transfer learning architecture with dynamic location-aware sentiment and semantic analysis (TLSS) is adapted to a new application scenario: hospitalization rate prediction during COVID-19. This architecture learns and transfers general transmission patterns of existing epidemic diseases to predict hospitalization rates during COVID-19. Researchers combine the learned knowledge with time series features and news sentiment and semantic features in a dynamic propagation process. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare the proposed approach with several state-of-the-art machine learning methods with different lead times of ground truth. The results show that TLSS exhibits outstanding predictive performance for hospitalization rates. Thus, it provides advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for supporting decision-making in healthcare sustainability.
  • 329
  • 24 Nov 2023
Topic Review
Consequence of Alveolar Hyperoxia and Systemic Hyperoxaemia
Acute hypoxic respiratory failure (AHRF) is a prominent feature of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) critical illness. The need for a high FiO2 to normalise arterial hypoxemia and tissue hypoxia can result in alveolar hyperoxia. This in turn can lead to local alveolar oxidative stress with associated inflammation, alveolar epithelial cell apoptosis, surfactant dysfunction, pulmonary vascular abnormalities, resorption atelectasis, and impairment of innate immunity predisposing to secondary bacterial infections. While oxygen is a life-saving treatment, alveolar hyperoxia may exacerbate pre-existing lung injury.
  • 405
  • 20 Nov 2023
Topic Review
Influence of Media Information Sources on Vaccine Uptake
Vaccine hesitancy is a significant public health concern, with numerous studies demonstrating its negative impact on immunization rates. One factor that can influence vaccine hesitancy is media coverage of vaccination. The media is a significant source of immunization information and can significantly shape people’s attitudes and behaviors toward vaccine uptake. Media influences vaccination positively or negatively. Accurate coverage of the benefits and effectiveness of vaccination can encourage uptake, while coverage of safety concerns or misinformation may increase hesitancy.
  • 494
  • 15 Nov 2023
Topic Review
Social Connectedness
Poor social connectedness has long been recognised as a significant threat to both physical and mental health, particularly for older people. Numerous studies examining the health impacts of loneliness and isolation have demonstrated an association with negative outcomes such as increased mortality, cognitive decline, anxiety and depression and cardiovascular disease. However, with the rapid onset of the SARS-CoV-2 (otherwise known as COVID-19) virus in early 2020 came an additional threat to those already vulnerable to loneliness—enforced physical isolation. Confinement to the home was particularly important for the health of those in older age due to the increased mortality risk from the virus for that section of the population.
  • 300
  • 13 Nov 2023
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