Sociocultural impacts of COVID-19: A social representations perspective.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Wassler P
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8634773 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Social distancing policies (SDPs) implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have led to temporal and spatial shifts in water demand across cities. Water utilities need to understand these demand shifts to respond to potential operational and water-quality issues. Aided by a fixed-effects model of citywide water demand in Austin, Texas, we explore the impacts of various SDPs (e.g., time after the stay home-work safe order, reopening phases) using daily demand data gathered between 2013 and 2020. Our approach uses socio-technical determinants (e.g., climate, water conservation policy) with SDPs to model water demand, while accounting for spatial and temporal effects (e.g., geographic variations, weekday patterns). Results indicate shifts in behavior of residential and nonresidential demands that offset the change at the system scale, demonstrating a spatial redistribution of water demand after the stay home-work safe order. Our results show that some phases of Texas's reopening phases had statistically significant relationships to water demand. While this yielded only marginal net effects on overall demand, it underscores behavioral changes in demand at sub-system spatial scales. Our discussions shed light on SDPs' impacts on water demand. Equipped with our empirical findings, utilities can respond to potential vulnerabilities in their systems, such as water-quality problems that may be related to changes in water pressure in response to demand variations.
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Project description:COVID-19, a new emerging infectious disease (EID), has spread throughout the world, including Europe. Spain, in particular, has witnessed a significant outbreak of the pandemic. All classes have been canceled, and the government has declared a state of emergency, ordering the lockdown and confinement of the entire population. All children in the country have been confined to their homes since March 13 and are not allowed to leave at any time. This population is thus facing the harshest restrictions. Given the vulnerable situation of children, the aim of this research is to understand how they represent and emotionally cope with the COVID-19 crisis. A free association exercise elicited by the word "coronavirus" was completed by 228 children (age range: 3-12 years) from the North of Spain. To analyze the content, we employed the Reinert method with Iramuteq software for lexical analysis. The results revealed that children represent the COVID-19 as an enemy that is being fought by the doctors. Children are afraid and worried about catching the virus, but mainly because they think they can infect their grandparents, and this makes them feel guilty. Moreover, the lockdown situation has produced conflicting emotions in the children. On the one hand, they are scared, nervous, lonely, sad, bored, and angry, but they also feel safe, calm, and happy with their families. These results indicate the need for governments to also consider children in their management of the current situation by placing greater emphasis on social and inclusive policies to help alleviate the possible effects that they may suffer as a consequence of the pandemic and the lockdown. In short, there is a need to address the psychological, educational, social, health, and well-being needs of children.
| S-EPMC7456920 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This paper places the COVID-19 pandemic into perspective by comparing it to other recent disasters in terms of impacts on the macroeconomy of the U.S. We present a short summary of advances in the state-of-the-art of economic consequence analysis, as well as estimates this approach yields on economic impacts of 9/11, a variety of natural disasters, the Great Recession, and COVID-19. The prevention of these negative impacts represents the benefits of various types of risk management tactics and strategies. In light of the enormously greater economic impact of COVID-19 as compared to natural and man-made disasters, it is reasonable to question whether adequate investments are being made to prevent future pandemics.
| S-EPMC9764161 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionAlthough one of the most prominent interventions against COVID-19, face masks seem poorly adopted by the general population. A growing body of literature has found that using face masks has social meaning. This qualitative study assessed the perceptions, representations and practices of mask wearing in the general population.MethodsA qualitative survey by short semi-structured walking interviews was carried out from April to December 2021 in 11 cities in France's Pays de la Loire region. Study locations were selected for their varied geographical, social, and economic characteristics, with urbanized and rural areas. Four domains linked to perceptions of masks and wearing them were explored: (i) evolution in mask wearing, (ii) decision-making methods for wearing and not wearing; (iii) incorporating the mask into way of life; (iv) projecting into the future.ResultsA total of 116 people were interviewed. Masks marked a shift from the ordinary world to the pandemic. Overall, interviewees considered masks an obstacle to breathing, communication, and social interactions, leading to establishing strategies circumventing the mask mandate. Poor attention was paid to their medical usefulness as an obligatory clothing accessory. Mask-wearing decisions were driven by social relations, common sense, and vulnerability. The greater the feeling of security (i.e., being with close relatives), the less it was worn or worn properly, with decreased attention to others and their health. Most participants did not remember learning to wear a mask. Some were convinced that mask-wearing could not be learned (experiential knowledge). Institutions (school and work) played a central role by facilitating incorporation of masks into daily life.ConclusionsThis study emphasizes the need to reinforce the individual medical values of face masks to prevent COVID-19. Ambitious education and training programmes should be planned to learn how and when to wear masks. Institutions (work and school) may be critical for this purpose.
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Project description:Documenting the emergent social representations of COVID-19 in public communication is necessary for critically reflecting on pandemic responses and providing guidance for global pandemic recovery policies and practices. This study documents the dynamics of changing social representations of the COVID-19 pandemic on one of the largest Chinese social media, Weibo, from December 2019 to April 2020. We draw on the social representation theory (SRT) and conceptualize topics and topic networks as a form of social representation. We analyzed a dataset of 40 million COVID-19 related posts from 9.7 million users (including the general public, opinion leaders, and organizations) using machine learning methods. We identified 12 topics and found an expansion in social representations of COVID-19 from a clinical and epidemiological perspective to a broader perspective that integrated personal illness experiences with economic and sociopolitical discourses. Discussions about COVID-19 science did not take a prominent position in the representations, suggesting a lack of effective science and risk communication. Further, we found the strongest association of social representations existed between the public and opinion leaders and the organizations' representations did not align much with the other two groups, suggesting a lack of organizations' influence in public representations of COVID-19 on social media in China.
| S-EPMC9151658 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundNurses are at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, nurses have faced an elevated risk of exposure and have experienced the hazards related to a novel virus. While being heralded as lifesaving heroes on the front lines of the pandemic, nurses have experienced more physical, mental, and psychosocial problems as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak. Social media discussions by nursing professionals participating in publicly formed Facebook groups constitute a valuable resource that offers longitudinal insights.ObjectiveThis study aimed to explore how COVID-19 impacted nurses through capturing public sentiments expressed by nurses on a social media discussion platform and how these sentiments changed over time.MethodsWe collected over 110,993 Facebook discussion posts and comments in an open COVID-19 group for nurses from March 2020 until the end of November 2020. Scraping of deidentified offline HTML tags on social media posts and comments was performed. Using subject-matter expert opinions and social media analytics (ie, topic modeling, information retrieval, and sentiment analysis), we performed a human-in-a-loop analysis of nursing professionals' key perspectives to identify trends of the COVID-19 impact among at-risk nursing communities. We further investigated the key insights of the trends of the nursing professionals' perspectives by detecting temporal changes of comments related to emotional effects, feelings of frustration, impacts of isolation, shortage of safety equipment, and frequency of safety equipment uses. Anonymous quotes were highlighted to add context to the data.ResultsWe determined that COVID-19 impacted nurses' physical, mental, and psychosocial health as expressed in the form of emotional distress, anger, anxiety, frustration, loneliness, and isolation. Major topics discussed by nurses were related to work during a pandemic, misinformation spread by the media, improper personal protective equipment (PPE), PPE side effects, the effects of testing positive for COVID-19, and lost days of work related to illness.ConclusionsPublic Facebook nursing groups are venues for nurses to express their experiences, opinions, and concerns and can offer researchers an important insight into understanding the COVID-19 impact on health care workers.
| S-EPMC8668023 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background: Verified and authentic information about coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on social networking sites (SNS) could help people make appropriate decisions to protect themselves. However, little is known about what factors influence people's sharing of verified information about COVID-19. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the factors that influence people's sharing of verified information about COVID-19 on social networking sites. Methods: Based on social exchange theory, we explore the factors that influence sharing of verified information about COVID-19 from two perspectives: benefits and costs. We employed the survey method to validate our hypothesized relationships. By using our developed measurement instruments, we collected 347 valid responses from SNS users and utilized the partial least squares method to analyze the data. Results: Among the benefits of sharing verified information about COVID-19, enjoyment in helping (β = 0.357, p = 0.000), altruism (β = 0.133, p = 0.029) and reputation (β = 0.202, p = 0.000) were significantly associated with verified information sharing about COVID-19. Regarding the costs of sharing verified information about COVID-19, both verification cost (β = -0.078, p = 0.046) and executional cost (β = -0.126, p = 0.011) also significantly affect verified information sharing about COVID-19. All the proposed hypotheses were supported. Conclusions: By exploring factors from both benefits and costs perspectives, we could understand users' intention to share verified information about COVID-19 comprehensively. This study not only contributes to the literature on information sharing, but also has implications concerning users' behaviors on SNS.
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Project description:Background The first wave of COVID-19 in Calgary, Alberta accelerated the integration of primary care with the province’s centrally managed health system. This integration aimed to deliver wraparound in-community patient care through two interventions that combined to create the COVID-19 Integrated Pathway (CIP). The CIP’s interventions were: 1) a data sharing platform that ensured COVID-19 test results were directly available to family physicians (FPs), and 2) a clinical algorithm that supported FPs in delivering in-community follow up to improve patient outcomes. We describe the CIP function and its capacity to facilitate FP follow-up with COVID-19 patients and evaluate its impact on Emergency Department (ED) visits and hospitalization. Method We generated descriptive statistics by analyzing data from a Calgary Zone hub clinic called the Calgary COVID-19 Care Clinic (C4), provincially maintained records of hospitalization, ED visits, and physician claims. Results Between Apr. 16 and Sep. 27, 2020, 7289 patients were referred by the Calgary Public Health team to the C4 clinic. Of those, 48.6% were female, the median age was 37.4 y. 97% of patients had at least one visit with a healthcare professional, where follow-up was conducted using the CIP’s algorithm. 5.1% of patients visited an ED and 1.9% were hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. 75% of patients had a median of 4 visits with their FP. Discussion Our data suggest that information exchange between Primary Care (PC) and central systems facilitates primary care-based management of patients with COVID-19 in the community and has potential to reduce acute care visits. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12875-022-01916-3.
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Project description:We used 2-photon calcium imaging to determine whether the same or different dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTADA) encode food and social stimuli, and found statistically significant overlap in the populations responsive to both stimuli. Both hunger and opposite-sex social experience increased the proportion of neurons that respond to both stimuli, implying that increasing motivation for one stimulus further increases overlap. We used single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) to examine cell type-specific gene expression changes across different hunger states and the level of co-expression of feeding- and social-hormone related genes in individual VTADA neurons.
2023-08-21 | GSE235149 | GEO
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC7834519 | biostudies-literature