Science

Covid-19 tweets analysis for human emotion detection

Written by Md Yasin Kabir and Sanjay Madria on 18 March 2021.

Social media is a place for people to share their feelings, concerns, questions, and opinions. This is as true during the Covid-19 pandemic as it has been at any other time since Twitter, Facebook and other similar services came into existence. But the things people talk about during the pandemic are likely to be different to what they talk about in normal times. After all, at various points throughout 2020, people have been forced to stay at home in the interests of public health, schools have temporarily closed, family and friends have been kept apart, and many individuals have lost their jobs or sources of income.

We need a randomized study of the UK’s decision to defer second doses of the mRNA vaccine

Written by Sheila M. Bird on 11 February 2021.

Just a few days before the UK began its roll-out of a second Covid-19 vaccine, the decision was made to defer second doses of both vaccines to 12 weeks in order to maximize the number of citizens in “priority groups” who would receive a first dose by mid-February 2021. This decision departed radically from the trialled inter-dose interval of 3 weeks for the Pfizer/BioNTech messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, the world’s first mRNA vaccine, and so is immunologically heroic.

Vaccine rollouts, school testing and contact tracing could all be improved – here’s how

Written by Sylvia Richardson on 08 February 2021.

A bitter lesson of the past month is that viruses move fast. The good news of the deployment of the first Covid-19 vaccines was accompanied by the bad news that a new variant of the virus had emerged, quickening the disease’s spread and pushing up the number of patients treated in hospital.

Controlling the spread of coronavirus via repeat testing and isolation

Written by Joseph T. Chang and Edward H. Kaplan on 25 November 2020.

What to do about Covid? With nearly 60 million cases and 1.4 million deaths worldwide as of the end of November 2020, there are still no consistently effective treatments or approved vaccines yet (though large-scale vaccine trials have already produced promising results). Social distancing, mask wearing, and infection control practices can reduce the rate of spread somewhat, but as long as infectious individuals circulate amongst susceptible persons, continued spread is inevitable, given that most populations have not built immunity against SARS-CoV-2 to any meaningful extent.

The evolution of the endemic stage of the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy during summer 2020

Written by Robbayes-C19: Paolo Girardi, Luca Greco, Monica Musio, Walter Racugno and Laura Ventura on 05 November 2020.

Italy was the first European country to suffer a severe outbreak of Covid-19. The first cases were reported on 21 February. Daily confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths grew very fast from that point, until they peaked during the first days of April. In order to slow the spread of the epidemic, the Italian government placed a variety of restrictions on the public, culminating in a complete lockdown that lasted until 4 May.