Go local: The key to controlling the COVID-19 pandemic in the post lockdown era
Isabel Bennett, Jobie Budd, Erin M. Manning, Ed Manley, Mengdie Zhuang, Ingemar J. Cox, Michael Short, Anne M. Johnson, Deenan Pillay, Rachel A. McKendry
The UK government announced its first wave of lockdown easing on 10 May 2020, two months after the non-pharmaceutical measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 were first introduced on 23 March 2020. Analysis of reported case rate data from Public Health England and aggregated and anonymised crowd level mobility data shows variability across local authorities in the UK. A locality-based approach to lockdown easing is needed, enabling local public health and associated health and social care services to rapidly respond to emerging hotspots of infection. National level data will hide an increasing heterogeneity of COVID-19 infections and mobility, and new ways of real-time data presentation to the public are required. Data sources (including mobile) allow for faster visualisation than more traditional data sources, and are part of a wider trend towards near real-time analysis of outbreaks needed for timely, targeted local public health interventions. Real time data visualisation may give early warnings of unusual levels of activity which warrant further investigation by local public health authorities.
The synthetic control method is an empirical methodology forcausal inference using observational data. By observing thespread of COVID-19 throughout the world, we analyze the dataon the number of deaths and cases in different regions usingthe power of prediction, counterfactual analysis, and syntheticinterventions of the synthetic control and its extensions. Weobserve that the number of deaths and cases in different re-gions would have been much smaller had the lockdowns beenimposed earlier and had the re-openings been done later, es-pecially among indoor bars and restaurants. We also analyzet…
On the 23rd March 2020, the UK entered a period of lockdown in the face of a deadly pandemic. While some were unable to work from home, many organisations were forced to move their activities online. Here, we discuss the technologies they used, from a privacy and security perspective. We also mention the communication failures that have exacerbated uncertainty and anxiety during the crisis. An organisation could be driven to move their activities online by a range of disasters, of which a global pandemic is only one. We seek, in this paper, to highlight the need for organisations to have conti…
This research discusses how to utilise digital gaming to support the well-being of its users and sustain their physical and mental health during the COVID-19 lockdown in which people's activities are limited. The published academic literature that is written in English and available for access on online databases was reviewed to develop key take-aways and a framework for discussing how to enhance people's well-being in the COVID-19 lockdown. Interaction with other players in virtual communities has been found to have a positive influence on the mental health of those suffering from a lack of s…
There has been a huge spike in the usage of social media platforms during the COVID-19 lockdowns. These lockdown periods have resulted in a set of new cybercrimes, thereby allowing attackers to victimise social media users with a range of threats. This paper performs a large-scale study to investigate the impact of a pandemic and the lockdown periods on the security and privacy of social media users. We analyse 10.6 Million COVID-related tweets from 533 days of data crawling and investigate users' security and privacy behaviour in three different periods (i.e., before, during, and after the lo…
This research paper studies about the role of social media use and increase the risk factor of mental health during covid 19 or lockdown. Although few studies have been conducted on the role about the effect of social media use on mental health during lockdown and impact on human reactive nature during lockdown. As a rapidly spreading pandemic, a biomedical disease has serious physical and tremendous mental health implications. An occupational community of internal migrant workers is one of the most vulnerable, but neglected, and is likely to develop psychological ill-effects due to COVID-19's…
The emergence of novel COVID-19 causing an overload in health system and high mortality rate. The key priority is to contain the epidemic and prevent the infection rate. In this context, many countries are now in some degree of lockdown to ensure extreme social distancing of entire population and hence slowing down the epidemic spread. Further, authorities use case quarantine strategy and manual second/third contact-tracing to contain the COVID-19 disease. However, manual contact tracing is time consuming and labor-intensive task which tremendously overload public health systems. In this paper…
Compliance with public health measures, such as restrictions on movement and socialization, is paramount in limiting the spread of diseases such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (also referred to as COVID-19). Although large population datasets, such as phone-based mobility data, may provide some glimpse into such compliance, it is often proprietary, and may not be available for all locales. In this work, we examine the usefulness of video sharing on social media as a proxy of the amount of time Internet users spend at home. In particular, we focus on the number of people…
In this paper, we describe the results of analyzing a large-scale survey, called the Covid19Impact survey, to assess citizens feedback on four areas related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain: social contact behavior, financial impact, working situation and health status. A total of 24 questions cover the areas of demographics, their home situation, social contact behavior, personal economic impact, their workplace situation and their health. The survey was responded to by 156,614 participants between the evening of March 28th and April 2nd, 2020. Such a large response enables us to gain new in…
In the opening months of 2020, COVID-19 changed the way for which people work, forcing more people to work from home. This research investigates the impact of COVID-19 on five researchers' work and private roles, happiness, and mobile and desktop activity patterns. Desktop and smartphone application usage were gathered before and during COVID-19. Individuals' roles and happiness were captured through experience sampling. Our analysis show that researchers tend to work more during COVID-19 resulting an imbalance of work and private roles. We also found that as working styles and patterns as wel…
What makes cyber risks arising from connected systems challenging during the management of a pandemic? Assuming that a variety of cyber-physical systems are already operational-collecting, analyzing, and acting on data autonomously-what risks might arise in their application to pandemic management? We already have these systems operational, collecting, and analyzing data autonomously, so how would a pandemic monitoring app be different or riskier? In this review article, we discuss the digitalization of COVID-19 pandemic management and cyber risk from connected systems.
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed mobile health applications and telemedicine from nice to have tools into essential healthcare infrastructure. This need is particularly great for the elderly who, due to their greater risk for infection, may avoid medical facilities or be required to self-isolate. These are also the very groups at highest risk for cognitive decline. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic artificially intelligent conversational agents were employed by hospitals and government agencies (such as the CDC) to field queries from patients about symptoms and treatments. Digital…
In this work we investigate the short-term variations in air quality emissions, attributed to the prevention measures, applied in different cities, to mitigate the COVID-19 spread. In particular, we emphasize on the concentration effects regarding specific pollutant gases, such as carbon monoxide (CO), ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2). The assessment of the impact of lockdown on air quality focused on four European Cities (Athens, Gladsaxe, Lodz and Rome). Available data on pollutant factors were obtained using global satellite observations. The level of the employe…
Given concerns about mental health during periods of Covid-19 lockdown, it important to understand how engagement with online Covid-19 related material can affect mood. In the UK and Ireland, online community support initiatives (OCSIs) have emerged to help people manage their lives. Yet, little is known about how people engaged with these or whether they influenced subsequent mood. We conducted surveys to explore how people in the UK and Ireland engaged with OCSIs, and found that 70% did so to offer support (e.g. to provide company). Those who did so reported feeling significantly calmer afte…
As of July 31, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has over 17 million reported cases, causing more than 667,000 deaths. Countries irrespective of economic status have succumbed to this pandemic. Many aspects of the lives, including health, economy, freedom of movement have been negatively affected by the coronavirus outbreak. Numerous strategies have been taken in order to prevent the outbreak. Some countries took severe resections in the form of full-scale lockdown, while others took a moderate approach of dealing with the pandemics, for example, mass testing, prohibiting large-scale public gatherin…
The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic is affecting every facet of human lives (e.g., public health, education, economy, transportation, and the environment). This novel pandemic and citywide implemented lockdown measures are affecting virus transmission, people's travel patterns, and air quality. Many studies have been conducted to predict the COVID-19 diffusion, assess the impacts of the pandemic on human mobility and air quality, and assess the impacts of lockdown measures on viral spread with a range of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. This review study aims to analyze results from past res…
Purpose: Public attitudes towards COVID-19 and social distancing are critical in reducing its spread. It is therefore important to understand public reactions and information dissemination in all major forms, including on social media. This article investigates important issues reflected on Twitter in the early stages of the public reaction to COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach: A thematic analysis of the most retweeted English-language tweets mentioning COVID-19 during March 10-29, 2020. Findings: The main themes identified for the 87 qualifying tweets accounting for 14 million retweets we…
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments imposed lock downs that forced hundreds of millions of citizens to stay at home. The implementation of confinement measures increased Internet traffic demands of residential users, in particular, for remote working, entertainment, commerce, and education, which, as a result, caused traffic shifts in the Internet core. In this paper, using data from a diverse set of vantage points (one ISP, three IXPs, and one metropolitan educational network), we examine the effect of these lockdowns on traffic shifts. We find that the traffic volume increased by …
The present ongoing global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus is creating havoc across the world. The absence of any vaccine as well as any definitive drug to cure, has made the situation very grave. Therefore only few effective tools are available to contain the rapid pace of spread of this disease, named as COVID-19. On 24th March, 2020, the the Union Government of India made an announcement of unprecedented complete lockdown of the entire country effective from the next day. No exercise of similar scale and magnitude has been ever undertaken anywhere on the globe in the history of entire m…
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought profound change in the daily lives of a large part of the global population during 2020 and 2021. Such changes were mirrored in aspects such as changes to the overall energy consumption, or long periods of sustained inactivity inside public buildings. At the same time, due to the large proliferation of IoT, sensors and smartphones in the past few years, we are able to monitor such changes to a certain degree over time. In this paper, we focus on the effect of the pandemic on school buildings and certain aspects in the operation of schools. Our study is based o…
Banca d’Italia（意大利银行）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
In the COVID-19 outbreak, governments have applied progressive restrictions to production activities, permitting only those that are considered strategic or that provide essential services. This is particularly apparent in countries that have been stricken hard by the virus, with Italy being a major example. Yet we know that companies are not just isolated entities: They organize themselves into intricate shareholding structures --- forming company networks --- distributing decision power and dividends in sophisticated schemes for various purposes. One tool from the Artificial Intelligence (AI…
The COVID-19 global pandemic and the lockdown policies enacted to mitigate it have had profound effects on the labour market. Understanding these effects requires us to obtain and analyse data in as close to real time as possible, especially as rules change rapidly and local lockdowns are enacted. In this work we study the UK labour market by analysing data from the online job board Reed.co.uk. Using topic modelling and geo-inference methods we are able to break down the data by sector and geography. We also study how the salary, contract type and mode of work have changed since the COVID-19 c…
Discovering the influence of personal features in psychological processes using Artificial Intelligence techniques: the case of COVID19 lockdown in Spain
CEIEC Research Institute（CEIEC 研究所）；Universidad Francisco de Vitoria（弗朗西斯科·德·维多利亚大学）
The move to university life is characterized by strong emotions, some of them negative, such as loneliness, anxiety, and depression. These negative emotions are strengthened due to the obligatory lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research indicates association among the use of social media, university satisfaction, and the aforementioned emotions. We report findings from 248 international undergraduates in The Netherlands, all students at the International School of Business. Our results indicate strong correlations between anxiety, loneliness, and COVID-19-related stress with un…
We present and begin to explore a collection of social data that represents part of the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on the United States. This data is collected from a range of sources and includes longitudinal trends of news topics, social distancing behaviors, community mobility changes, web searches, and more. This multimodal effort enables new opportunities for analyzing the impacts such a pandemic has on the pulse of society. Our preliminary results show that the number of COVID-19-related news articles published immediately after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic on Mar…
Contact patterns play a key role in the spread of respiratory infectious diseases in human populations. During the COVID-19 pandemic the regular contact patterns of the population has been disrupted due to social distancing both imposed by the authorities and individual choices. Here we present the results of a contact survey conducted in Chinese provinces outside Hubei in March 2020, right after lockdowns were lifted. We then leveraged the estimated mixing patterns to calibrate a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, which was used to estimate different metrics of COVID-19 burden by age. Study pa…
Sheffield University（谢菲尔德大学）；The Open University（开放大学）
The UK has had a volatile political environment for some years now, with Brexit and leadership crises marking the past five years. With this work, we wanted to understand more about how the global health emergency, COVID-19, influences the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public. With this work, we wanted to understand more about how the global health emergency, COVID-19, influences the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public. This work covers the period of June to December 2020 and analyses Twi…
