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At the time of writing this book, the world was in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries have experienced two lengthy lockdowns where contact with others was significantly curtailed. In this chapter, based on first studies done in and outside Europe, and more specifically in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, we reflect more in depth on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for people living with dementia, their families and professional caregivers in different care settings: at home, day care facilities and nursing homes.
In essence, democracy in the workplace and the promotion of trade union representation are central to the survival of a democratic society.4 As a labor lawyer, I tend to think that law has a special role to play in this process. Yet my experience derived from Washington and Sacramento, both as a scholar and a practicing lawyer, convinces me of the limits of law. Law is subordinate to other factors, including union devotion to resources, the necessary expenditures involved, and the creation of strategic tactics and vision in organizing the unorganized – as well as foreign competition, American investment abroad, and technological innovation. Law is subordinate and can only play a symbiotic role in the proper promotion of collective bargaining by a reorganized movement. Law, however worthy of reform, has never been the solution in the past and is unlikely to be so now.
While the Cold War provides a clear basis for context when reading DeLillo's Underworld, events of the twenty-first century, after the novel's publication, also offer insight into our shifting understanding of the novel and the Cold War itself.
Discussing DeLillo's literary accomplishments, why different kinds of context matters to understanding the work, and setting up the book's sections and chapters.
Discussing DeLillo's relationship with postmodernism, with a focus on DeLillo's responses to critical and literary theory and the labels that critics have ascribed to his work.
The great labor changes of the 1930s, in the wake of the Roosevelt administration inauguration in the spring of 1933, took two forms. The first was not law or regulation at all. Anything but that. It consisted of the emergence of stoppages of considerable dimension in cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco, where the longshore strike was to emerge in 1934 (in both Seattle and San Francisco there was the possibility of a general strike, idling workers in many industries). Ambitious initiatives were now undertaken by both general unions (the Teamsters), as well as industrial unions, nascent labor organizations whose militancy frequently outstripped their counterpart American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft affiliates.
The move to online learning during COVID-19 deprived first-year students of friendships and other sources of social support that could buffer against stress during their transition to university. These effects may have been worse for international students than domestic students as many were subjected to travel restrictions or quarantine in addition to the usual stressors. This study examined the impact of COVID-19 on social connectedness and mental health of first-year students enrolled in a metropolitan university in Australia. The study involved 1239 students (30.4% international) and used a 3 (cohorts: 2019, 2020, 2021) × 2 (enrolment status: domestic and international) between-group design. Results showed that both loneliness and university belonging were significantly worse during the first year of COVID-19 compared to the year before or after. Contrary to expectation, domestic students were lonelier than international students across all cohorts. Multiple-group memberships did not change. As predicted, loneliness was moderately to highly correlated with the number of stressors, psychological distress, and (lower) well-being, whereas university belonging and multiple-group memberships were related to positive mental health outcomes. These findings highlight the need for initiatives that promote student connectedness and mental health as the university sector recovers from COVID-19.
This chapter focuses on m-Health, i.e. technologies offered through mobile devices with particular regard to those having a specific health purpose. The contribution highlights that the mass use of these technologies is raising many challenges to national and European legislators, who are now facing a twofold task: assuring safety and reliance of the data generated by these products and protecting patients/consumers’ privacy and confidentiality. From the first perspective, such software may sometimes be classified as medical devices, although this classification is not always easy since there could be “border-line products”. If a software is classified as a medical device, then its safety and efficacy are guaranteed by the applicability of relevant regulations, which dictate specific prerequisites, obligations and responsibilities for manufacturers as well as distributors. From a data protection perspective, the mass use of these technologies allows the collection of huge amounts of personal data, both sensitive data (as relating to health conditions) and data that can nonetheless contribute to the creation of detailed user profiles.
Telemedicine is the delivery of healthcare services by means of information and communication technologies. Although it was initially conceived as a means of overcoming geographical barriers and dealing with emergency situations, the spread of telemedicine in daily practice is reshaping the innermost features of medical practice and shifting organisational patterns in healthcare. Advocates of telemedicine argue that it will redesign healthcare accessibility, improving service quality and optimising costs. However, the use of telemedicine raises a number of ethical, legal and social issues, an overview of which is given in this chapter. The second section deals with the EU policy for the promotion of telemedicine, and reference is made to the provisions offered by the European Telehealth Code. In the third section, some of the major ethical concerns raised by telemedicine are discussed. In the fourth, room is given to the role of telemedicine within the management of the CoViD-19 health emergency. In the conclusions, it is argued that adequate policies and rules are required to ensure a consistent spread and a safe use of telemedicine in alternative to in-person healthcare.
This article analyses the Erdoğan government's policy response to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the abundant use of moral antagonisms in his discourse, Erdoğan did not attempt to politicize the pandemic, instead framing it as a global health crisis and presenting the government's public health policies as expert-driven and competent. However, this expert-driven approach was largely a performance. Without a system of democratic oversight or a free media to scrutinize government policies, the Erdoğan government could systematically undercount COVID-19 cases and disregard its own public health restrictions, all the while spreading its narrative of competence and success. Competitive policymaking by opposition-controlled municipalities and criticism from a strong doctors' association had relatively limited ability to discredit the government. The public opinion data we present reveal broad-based support for the government's COVID policies. Our article highlights how authoritarian institutions allow governments to sustain a gap between performance and actuality, granting their leaders greater possibilities to claim policy success.
A survey evaluated 2,300 healthcare workers following the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in a tertiary/quaternary hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Adherence to protective measures following vaccination was compared to previous non-work-related behaviors. Younger age, previous COVID-19 infection and burnout symptoms were associated with adherence reduction to mitigation measures.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that leveraging medical big data can help to better predict and control outbreaks from the outset. However, there are still challenges to overcome in the 21st century to efficiently use medical big data, promote innovation and public health activities and adequately protect individuals’ privacy. The metaphor that property is a “bundle of sticks” applies equally to medical big data. Understanding medical big data in this way raises a number of questions, including: Who has the right to make money off its buying and selling, or is it inalienable? When does medical big data become sufficiently stripped of identifiers that the rights of an individual concerning the data disappear? How have different regimes such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the US answered these questions differently? In this chapter, we will discuss three topics: (1) privacy and data sharing, (2) informed consent, and (3) ownership.
There has been a growing interest among pension plan sponsors in envisioning how the mortality experience of their active and deferred members may turn out to be if a pandemic similar to the COVID-19 occurs in the future. To address their needs, we propose in this paper a stochastic model for simulating future mortality scenarios with COVID-alike effects. The proposed model encompasses three parameter levels. The first level includes parameters that capture the long-term pattern of mortality, whereas the second level contains parameters that gauge the excess age-specific mortality due to COVID-19. Parameters in the first and second levels are estimated using penalised quasi-likelihood maximisation method which was proposed for generalised linear mixed models. Finally, the third level includes parameters that draw on expert opinions concerning, for example, how likely a COVID-alike pandemic will occur in the future. We illustrate our proposed model with data from the United States and a range of expert opinions.
Among outpatients with COVID-19 due to the Delta variant who did and did not receive two vaccine doses at 7 days post symptom onset there was no difference in viral shedding (cycle threshold difference 0.59, 95% CI -4.68–3.50; p=0.77) with SARS-CoV-2 cultured from 7% (2/28) and 4% (1/26), respectively.
In this cohort study of UK healthcare workers, we evaluated the use of fortnightly polymerase chain reaction (PCR) screening to facilitate the safe resumption of elective surgery in a low-prevalence setting. We found that adherence to serial testing was poor, and the resource required to identify 1 asymptomatic case was substantial.
Snake soup continues to be an iconic tradition in Cantonese culture. Yet little is known about the relationship between snake soup consumption in Hong Kong, wild snake populations, and the communities depending on this tradition for their livelihoods. We applied an interdisciplinary approach including interviews with shopkeepers and genetic analyses of snake meat samples to determine the species consumed in Hong Kong, their source locations, and shopkeepers’ views on the future of the industry. We genetically identified the common rat snake Ptyas mucosa, widely distributed throughout East and Southeast Asia, and the Javan spitting cobra Naja sputatrix, endemic to Indonesia, as the species most commonly consumed, which was consistent with interview responses. According to interviews, snakes had mostly been imported from mainland China in the past, but now tend to be sourced from Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. Interviews also revealed a pessimistic outlook on the continuation of this tradition because of various factors, including a lasting yet misinformed association of snakes with the 2002–2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Given the COVID-19 pandemic and China's ensuing ban on the consumption of terrestrial wildlife, Hong Kong's snake soup industry will probably continue to rely on Southeast Asian sources to persist. Given the cultural and conservation issues surrounding this tradition, further research on the economic, ecological and social consequences of snake consumption is needed to examine the broader implications of snake soup and similar industries in the region.