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AbstractThe ongoing outbreak of viral pneumonia in China and beyond is associated with a novel coronavirus, provisionally termed 2019-nCoV. This outbreak has been tentatively associated with a seafood market in Wuhan, China, where the sale of wild animals may be the source of zoonotic infection. Although bats are likely reservoir hosts for 2019-nCoV, the identity of any intermediate host facilitating transfer to humans is unknown. Here, we report the identification of 2019-nCoV related coronaviruses in pangolins (Manis javanica) seized in anti-smuggling operations in southern China. Metagenomic sequencing identified pangolin associated CoVs that belong to two sub-lineages of 2019-nCoV related coronaviruses, including one very closely related to 2019-nCoV in the receptor-binding domain. The discovery of multiple lineages of pangolin coronavirus and their similarity to 2019-nCoV suggests that pangolins should be considered as possible intermediate hosts for this novel human virus and should be removed from wet markets to prevent zoonotic transmission.

Electricity consumption has been affected due to worldwide lockdown policies against COVID-19. Many countries have pointed out that electricity supply security during the epidemic is critical to ensuring people’s livelihood. Accurate prediction of electricity demand would act a more important role in ensuring energy security for all the countries. Although there have been many studies on electricity forecasting, they did not consider the pandemic, and many works only considered the prediction accuracy and ignored the stability. Driven by the above reasons, it is necessary to develop an electricity consumption prediction model that can be well applied in the pandemic. In this work, a hybrid prediction system is proposed with data processing, modelling, and optimization. An improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise is used for data preprocessing, which overcomes the shortcomings of the original method; a multi-objective optimizer is adopted for ensuring the accuracy and stability; support vector machine is used as the prediction model. Taking daily electricity demand of US as an example, the results prove that the proposed hybrid models are superior to benchmark models in both prediction accuracy and stability. Moreover, selection of input parameters is discussed, and the results indicate that the model considering the daily infections has the highest prediction accuracy and stability, and it is proved that the proposed model has great potential in real-world applications. Highlights • A hybrid model is developed for predicting daily electricity demand during COVID-19. • The accuracy and stability of the new model are higher than those of benchmark models. • The proposed model also performs well in multi-step prediction. • The model that only considers daily infections has the best prediction performance.

This article reviews the role of digital technology in the fight against COVID-19 from the outbreak to the resumption of a ‘normal’ way of life, and the development of the digital economy heading t...

This paper discusses Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (ACNH) release during the COVID-19 pandemic. A combination of the game’s elements, including its comforting aesthetic, participatory community, financial mechanics and goal-setting, promotes the player’s construction of their sense of self and provides crucial stability during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. In contrast to other life simulator games such as The Sims, the timing of ACNH’s release makes its substitution efforts more adoptable by a wide spectrum of players between casual and hardcore sensibilities. Moreover, the game serves those players as a partial substitute for complex face-to-face interactions during self-isolation. Concurrently, the game’s offer of stability and routine presents a simulacrum of real life (though one that is comparatively exaggerated and narrowed in scope) promoting transference of regularity into the digital space, in contrast to the intense disruption of the everyday by the pandemic, and augmenting that transference with a focus on player agency and self-determination of playstyle. Players’ shared affinities and engagement with the game as a form of serious leisure create personas that offer a divergent range of roles that are not mutually-exclusive – the social player, the turnip trader, the gardener, the artisan – allowing players to adopt multiple specializations within an expansive social environment. In essence, players of ACNH create an array of malleable, interchangeable gaming persona that successfully embody the routine and social play that are forcibly absent from real life during the pandemic. This paper draws upon responses from nearly 2000 ACNH players to frame how the game, a life simulator released during a pandemic curtailing real life, acts as a digital intersection of routine substitution, agency and social connectivity in a disconnected physical world.

Plastics are versatile, durable, and can be manipulated to match different needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of reducing plastic waste and is believed to be responsible for increasing the generation of plastic waste by 54,000 tons/day which was reported in 2020. Another widely available waste is biomass waste. Agriculture and agroforestry, forest and wood processing, municipal waste, and the food industry are all considered major producers of biowaste. Co-gasification is considered one of the most promising methods of chemical recycling that targets the production of syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) and light hydrocarbon gases. In this study, the gasification of pure birch sawdust wood (BSD) and pure rice husk (RH) was compared with mixtures where each BSD and RH was mixed with both LDPE and HDPE in the presence of three different bed materials, namely silica sand, olivine, and red mud. It was found that mixing the biomass with LDPE and HDPE increased hydrogen gas (H2) production. The Hydrogen gas concentration in the product gas increased slightly from 10% to 12% by volume when birch sawdust (BSD) was mixed with LDPE with a ratio of 1:1, while the hydrogen gas concentration increased to 15-16% by volume when birch sawdust was mixed with HDPE with a ratio of 1:1 and olivine has been used as bed material. The lower heating value of the produced gas, which has a direct relationship with the hydrogen and light hydrocarbons concentration, increased from 2.8 to 5.7 MJ/Nm3. Red mud increased the lower heating value of the produced gas when rice husk was premixed with HDPE from 3-4 MJ/Nm3 to 5.5-6 MJ/J/Nm3, however, the main drawback of using red mud as a bed material was the occurrence of attrition which requires a precautionary measure to control the dust produced and prevent air pollution. The produced gases from the gasification processes are commonly used in internal combustion engines applications, but due to the high content of hydrogen gas (H2/CO range 2-3) in the product, it can be considered a renewable source of hydrogen by further processing the gas mixture to obtain pure hydrogen gas that is utilized in various chemical industries.

Home dialysis therapies are flexible kidney replacement strategies with documented clinical benefits. While the incidence of end-stage kidney disease continues to increase globally, the use of home dialysis remains low in most developed countries. Multiple barriers to providing home dialysis have been noted in the published literature. Among known challenges, gaps in clinician knowledge are potentially addressable with a focused education strategy. Recent national surveys in the United States and Australia have highlighted the need for enhanced home dialysis knowledge especially among nephrologists who have recently completed training. Traditional in-person continuing professional educational programmes have had modest success in promoting home dialysis and are limited by scale and the present global COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that the use of a ‘Hub and Spoke’ model of virtual home dialysis mentorship for nephrologists based on project ECHO would support home dialysis growth. We review the home dialysis literature, known educational gaps and plausible educational interventions to address current limitations in physician education Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has expanded rapidly throughout China. Major behavioral, clinical, and state interventions are underway currently to mitigate the epidemic and prevent the persistence of the virus in human populations in China and worldwide. It remains unclear how these unprecedented interventions, including travel restrictions, have affected COVID-19 spread in China. We use real-time mobility data from Wuhan and detailed case data including travel history to elucidate the role of case importation on transmission in cities across China and ascertain the impact of control measures. Early on, the spatial distribution of COVID-19 cases in China was well explained by human mobility data. Following the implementation of control measures, this correlation dropped and growth rates became negative in most locations, although shifts in the demographics of reported cases are still indicative of local chains of transmission outside Wuhan. This study shows that the drastic control measures implemented in China have substantially mitigated the spread of COVID-19. One sentence summary: The spread of COVID-19 in China was driven by human mobility early on and mitigated substantially by drastic control measures implemented since the end of January.

Using a sample of the G20 countries, we examine the impact of COVID-19 on stock return and volatility connectedness, and whether the connectedness measures behave differently for countries with SARS 2003 experience. We find that both stock return and volatility connectedness increase across the phases of the COVID-19 pandemic which is more more pronounced as the severity of the pandemic builds up. However, the degree of connectedness is significantly lower in countries with SARS 2003 death experience. Our results are robust to different measures of COVID-19 severity and controlling for a number of cross-country differences in economic development. Highlights • We examine the impact of COVID-19 on stock return and volatility connectedness. • We assess if connectedness measures behave differently for countries with SARS 2003 experience. • Both stock return and volatility connectedness increase across the phases of the COVID-19. • Both connectedness is more pronounced as the severity of the pandemic builds up. • The degree of connectedness is lower in countries with SARS 2003 death experience.

The development of various medications, vaccines and surgical methods in healthcare has been significantly contributing to longer life expectancy. However, there are still various challenges that need to be addressed in the healthcare system. One of the biggest challenges in streamlining processes is that medical staff are required to do various repetitive tasks manually. This study aims to examine how automation and robotics can be utilized to improve the efficiency of healthcare/biomedical services. The high-end collaborative robot, the “YuMi” robot is proposed to modify and streamline biomedical lab operations to work side-by-side with biomedical lab technicians to assist various repetitive and routine tasks. Four potential frameworks (i.e., aged care, sorting and dispensing medicines, assisting at surgical operations and sample collection) are developed to identify potential applications of the Yumi robot. With the Covid-19 pandemic situation, there is an immediate need for safe sample collections and patient interaction to mitigate the outbreak of the virus. In this study, a framework for the sample collection and testing of Covid-19 is also proposed to minimize the risks of medical staff and local transmissions. Samples testing of suspected patients, travellers, and those in close contact with Covid-19 patients will proceed without direct interactions with healthcare workers, eventually, minimizing exposure and spread of this communicable disease. Refereed/Peer-reviewed