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Toll-like receptor (TLR) can trigger an immune response against virus including SARS-CoV-2. TLR expression/distribution is varying in mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) depending on their culture environments. Here, to explore the effect of periodic thermomechanical cues on TLRs, thermally controlled shape-memory polymer sheets with programmable actuation capacity were created. The proportion of MSCs expressing SARS-CoV-2-associated TLRs was increased upon stimulation. The TLR4/7 colocalization was promoted and retained in the endoplasmic reticula. The TLR redistribution was driven by myosin-mediated F-actin assembly. These results highlight the potential of boosting the immunity for combating COVID-19 via thermomechanical preconditioning of MSCs.
Urban air pollution is a substantial threat to human health. Traffic emissions remain a large contributor to air pollution in urban areas. The mobility restrictions put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic provided a large-scale real-world experiment that allows for the evaluation of changes in traffic emissions and the corresponding changes in air quality. Here we use observational data, as well as modelling, to analyse changes in nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and particulate matter resulting from the COVID-19 restrictions at the height of the lockdown period in Spring of 2020. Accounting for the influence of meteorology on air quality, we found that reduction of ca. 30-50 % in traffic counts, dominated by changes in passenger cars, corresponded to reductions in median observed nitrogen dioxide concentrations of ca. 40 % (traffic and urban background locations) and a ca. 22 % increase in ozone (urban background locations) during weekdays. Lesser reductions in nitrogen dioxide concentrations were observed at urban background stations at weekends, and no change in ozone was observed. The modelled reductions in median nitrogen dioxide at urban background locations were smaller than the observed reductions and the change was not significant. The model results showed no significant change in ozone on weekdays or weekends. The lack of a simulated weekday/weekend effect is consistent with previous work suggesting that NOx emissions from traffic could be significantly underestimated in European cities by models. These results indicate the potential for improvements in air quality due to policies for reducing traffic, along with the scale of reductions that would be needed to result in meaningful changes in air quality if a transition to sustainable mobility is to be seriously considered. They also confirm once more the highly relevant role of traffic for air quality in urban areas.
COVID-19
(2021)
We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed — particularly women — in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are about one-third more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. We do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, e.g., the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship.
From learners to educators
(2020)
The rapid growth of technology and its evolving potential to support the transformation of teaching and learning in post-secondary institutions is a major challenge to the basic understanding of both the university and the communities it serves. In higher education, the standard forms of learning and teaching are increasingly being challenged and a more comprehensive process of differentiation is taking place. Student-centered teaching methods are becoming increasingly important in course design and the role of the lecturer is changing from the knowledge mediator to moderator and learning companion. However, this is accelerating the need for strategically planned faculty support and a reassessment of the role of teaching and learning. Even though the benefits of experience-based learning approaches for the development of life skills are well known, most knowledge transfer is still realized through lectures in higher education. Teachers have the goal to design the curriculum, new assignments, and share insights into evolving pedagogy. Student engagement could be the most important factor in the learning success of university students, regardless of the university program or teaching format. Against this background, this article presents the development, application, and initial findings of an innovative learning concept. In this concept, students are allowed to deal with a scientific topic, but instead of a presentation and a written elaboration, their examination consists of developing an online course in terms of content, didactics, and concept to implement it in a learning environment, which is state of the art. The online courses include both self-created teaching material and interactive tasks. The courses are created to be available to other students as learning material after a review process and are thus incorporated into the curriculum.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all schools in Germany were locked down for several months in 2020. How schools realized teaching during the school lockdown greatly varied from school to school. N = 2,647 parents participated in an online survey and rated the following activities of teachers in mathematics, language arts (German), English, and science / biology during the school lockdown: frequency of sending task assignments, task solutions and requesting for solutions, giving task-related feedback, grading tasks, providing lessons per videoconference, and communicating via telecommunication tools with students and / or parents. Parents also reported student academic outcomes during the school lockdown (child's learning motivation, competent and independent learning, learning progress). Parents further reported student characteristics and social background variables: child's negative emotionality, school engagement, mathematical and language competencies, and child's social and cultural capital. Data were separately analyzed for elementary and secondary schools. In both samples, frequency of student-teacher communication was associated with all academic outcomes, except for learning progress in elementary school. Frequency of parent-teacher communication was associated with motivation and learning progress, but not with competent and independent learning, in both samples. Other distant teaching activities were differentially related to students' academic outcomes in elementary vs. secondary school. School engagement explained most additional variance in all students' outcomes during the school lockdown. Parent's highest school leaving certificate incrementally predicted students' motivation, and competent and independent learning in secondary school, as well as learning progress in elementary school. The variable "child has own bedroom" additionally explained variance in students' competent and independent learning during the school lockdown in both samples. Thus, both teaching activities during the school lockdown as well as children's characteristics and social background were independently important for students' motivation, competent and independent learning, and learning progress. Results are discussed with regard to their practical implications for realizing distant teaching.
Background:
Corona contact tracing apps are a novel and promising measure to reduce the spread of COVID-19. They can help to balance the need to maintain normal life and economic activities as much as possible while still avoiding exponentially growing case numbers. However, a majority of citizens need to be willing to install such an app for it to be effective. Hence, knowledge about drivers for app uptake is crucial.
Objective:
This study aimed to add to our understanding of underlying psychological factors motivating app uptake. More specifically, we investigated the role of concern for one's own health and concern to unknowingly infect others.
Methods:
A two-wave survey with 346 German-speaking participants from Switzerland and Germany was conducted. We measured the uptake of two decentralized contact tracing apps officially launched by governments (Corona-Warn-App, Germany; SwissCovid, Switzerland), as well as concerns regarding COVID-19 and control variables.
Results:
Controlling for demographic variables and general attitudes toward the government and the pandemic, logistic regression analysis showed a significant effect of self-focused concerns (odds ratio [OR] 1.64, P=.002). Meanwhile, concern of unknowingly infecting others did not contribute significantly to the prediction of app uptake over and above concern for one's own health (OR 1.01, P=.92). Longitudinal analyses replicated this pattern and showed no support for the possibility that app uptake provokes changes in levels of concern. Testing for a curvilinear relationship, there was no evidence that "too much" concern leads to defensive reactions and reduces app uptake.
Conclusions:
As one of the first studies to assess the installation of already launched corona tracing apps, this study extends our knowledge of the motivational landscape of app uptake. Based on this, practical implications for communication strategies and app design are discussed.
Who suffered most?
(2022)
Objective:
This study examines gender and socioeconomic inequalities in parental psychological wellbeing (parenting stress and psychological distress) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.
Background:
The dramatic shift of childcare and schooling responsibility from formal institutions to private households during the pandemic has put families under enormous stress and raised concerns about caregivers' health and wellbeing. Despite the overwhelming media attention to families’ wellbeing, to date limited research has examined parenting stress and parental psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in Germany.
Method:
We analyzed four waves of panel data (N= 1,771) from an opt-in online survey, which was conducted between March 2020 and April 2021. Multivariable OLS regressions were used to estimate variations in the pandemic's effects on parenting stress and psychological distress by various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
Results:
Overall, levels of parenting stress and psychological distress increased during the pandemic. During the first and third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, mothers, parents with children younger than 11 years, parents with two or more children, parents working from home as well as parents with financial insecurity experienced higher parenting stress than other sociodemographic groups. Moreover, women, respondents with lower incomes, single parents, and parents with younger children experienced higher levels of psychological distress than other groups.
Conclusion:
Gender and socioeconomic inequalities in parents' psychological wellbeing increased among the study participants during the pandemic.
The degree of detrimental effects inflicted on mankind by the COVID-19 pandemic increased the need to develop ASSURED (Affordable, Sensitive, Specific, User-friendly, Rapid and Robust, Equipment-free, and Deliverable) POCT (point of care testing) to overcome the current and any future pandemics. Much effort in research and development is currently advancing the progress to overcome the diagnostic pressure built up by emerging new pathogens. LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) is a well-researched isothermal technique for specific nucleic acid amplification which can be combined with a highly sensitive immunochromatographic readout via lateral flow assays (LFA). Here we discuss LAMP-LFA robustness, sensitivity, and specificity for SARS-CoV-2 N-gene detection in cDNA and clinical swab-extracted RNA samples. The LFA readout is designed to produce highly specific results by incorporation of biotin and FITC labels to 11-dUTP and LF (loop forming forward) primer, respectively. The LAMP-LFA assay was established using cDNA for N-gene with an accuracy of 95.65%. To validate the study, 82 SARS-CoV-2-positive RNA samples were tested. Reverse transcriptase (RT)-LAMP-LFA was positive for the RNA samples with an accuracy of 81.66%; SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA was detected by RT-LAMP-LFA for as low as CT-33. Our method reduced the detection time to 15 min and indicates therefore that RT-LAMP in combination with LFA represents a promising nucleic acid biosensing POCT platform that combines with smartphone based semi-quantitative data analysis.
Background:
There is evidence that fully recovered COVID-19 patients usually resume physical exercise, but do not perform at the same intensity level performed prior to infection. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 infection and recovery as well as muscle fatigue on cardiorespiratory fitness and running biomechanics in female recreational runners.
Methods:
Twenty-eight females were divided into a group of hospitalized and recovered COVID-19 patients (COV, n = 14, at least 14 days following recovery) and a group of healthy age-matched controls (CTR, n = 14). Ground reaction forces from stepping on a force plate while barefoot overground running at 3.3 m/s was measured before and after a fatiguing protocol. The fatigue protocol consisted of incrementally increasing running speed until reaching a score of 13 on the 6-20 Borg scale, followed by steady-state running until exhaustion. The effects of group and fatigue were assessed for steady-state running duration, steady-state running speed, ground contact time, vertical instantaneous loading rate and peak propulsion force.
Results:
COV runners completed only 56% of the running time achieved by the CTR (p < 0.0001), and at a 26% slower steady-state running speed (p < 0.0001). There were fatigue-related reductions in loading rate (p = 0.004) without group differences. Increased ground contact time (p = 0.002) and reduced peak propulsion force (p = 0.005) were found for COV when compared to CTR.
Conclusion:
Our results suggest that female runners who recovered from COVID-19 showed compromised running endurance and altered running kinetics in the form of longer stance periods and weaker propulsion forces. More research is needed in this area using larger sample sizes to confirm our study findings.
The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has forced most academics to work from home. This sudden venue change can affect academics' productivity and exacerbate the challenges that confront universities as they face an uncertain future. In this paper, we identify factors that influence academics' productivity while working from home during the mandate to self-isolate. From analyzing results from a global survey we conducted, we found that both personal and technology-related factors affect an individual's attitude toward working from home and productivity. Our results should prove valuable to university administrators to better address the work-life challenges that academics face.
This article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of COVID-19 crisis governance in the first half of 2020 from a cross-country comparative perspective. It focuses on the issue of opportunity management, that is, how the crisis was used by relevant actors of distinctly different administrative cultures as a window of opportunity. We started from an overall interest in the factors that have influenced the national politics of crisis management to answer the question of whether and how political and administrative actors in various countries have used the crisis as an opportunity to facilitate, accelerate or prevent changes in institutional settings. The objective is to study the institutional settings and governance structures, (alleged) solutions and remedies, and constellations of actors and preferences that have influenced the mode of crisis and opportunity management. Finally, the article summarizes some major comparative findings drawn from the country studies of this Special Issue, focusing on similarities and differences in crisis responses and patterns of opportunity management.
The COVID-19 pandemic and related closures of day care centres and schools significantly increased the amount of care work done by parents. There has been much speculation over whether the pandemic increased or decreased gender equality in parental care work. Based on representative data for Germany from spring 2020 and winter 2021 we present an empirical analysis that shows that although gender inequality in the division of care work increased to some extent in the beginning of the pandemic, it returned to the pre-pandemic level in the second lockdown almost nine months later. These results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic neither aggravated nor lessened inequality in the division of unpaid care work among mothers and fathers in any persistent way in Germany.
We introduce non-Markovian SIR epidemic spreading model inspired by the characteristics of the COVID-19, by considering discrete-and continuous-time versions. The distributions of infection intensity and recovery period may take an arbitrary form. By taking corresponding choice of these functions, it is shown that the model reduces to the classical Markovian case. The epidemic threshold is analytically determined for arbitrary functions of infectivity and recovery and verified numerically. The relevance of the model is shown by modeling the first wave of the epidemic in Italy, Spain and the UK, in the spring, 2020.
Background:
Early reports indicate that AKI is common among patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and associatedwith worse outcomes. However, AKI among hospitalized patients with COVID19 in the United States is not well described.
Methods:
This retrospective, observational study involved a review of data from electronic health records of patients aged >= 18 years with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 admitted to the Mount Sinai Health System from February 27 to May 30, 2020. We describe the frequency of AKI and dialysis requirement, AKI recovery, and adjusted odds ratios (aORs) with mortality.
Results:
Of 3993 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, AKI occurred in 1835 (46%) patients; 347 (19%) of the patientswith AKI required dialysis. The proportionswith stages 1, 2, or 3 AKIwere 39%, 19%, and 42%, respectively. A total of 976 (24%) patients were admitted to intensive care, and 745 (76%) experienced AKI. Of the 435 patients with AKI and urine studies, 84% had proteinuria, 81% had hematuria, and 60% had leukocyturia. Independent predictors of severe AKI were CKD, men, and higher serum potassium at admission. In-hospital mortality was 50% among patients with AKI versus 8% among those without AKI (aOR, 9.2; 95% confidence interval, 7.5 to 11.3). Of survivors with AKI who were discharged, 35% had not recovered to baseline kidney function by the time of discharge. An additional 28 of 77 (36%) patients who had not recovered kidney function at discharge did so on posthospital follow-up.
Conclusions:
AKI is common among patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and is associated with high mortality. Of all patients with AKI, only 30% survived with recovery of kidney function by the time of discharge.
In response to strong revenue and income losses facing a large share of self-employed individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency-aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the impact of this program on the confidence to survive the crisis. We investigate how the digitalization level of self-employed individuals influences the program’s effectiveness. Employing propensity score matching, we find that the emergency-aid program had only moderately positive effects on the confidence of self-employed to survive the crisis. However, self-employed whose businesses were highly digitalized, benefitted much more from the state aid than those whose businesses were less digitalized. This only holds true for those self-employed, who started the digitalization processes already before the crisis. Taking a regional perspective, we find suggestive evidence that the quality of the regional broadband infrastructure matters in the sense that it increases the effectiveness of the emergency-aid program. Our findings show the interplay between governmental support programs, the digitalization levels of entrepreneurs, and the regional digital infrastructure. The study helps public policy to improve the impact of crisis-related policy instruments, ultimately increasing the resilience of small firms in times of crises.
Pandemic depression
(2022)
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these differences. In addition, we find larger mental health responses among self-employed women who were directly affected by government-imposed restrictions and bore an increased childcare burden due to school and daycare closures. We also find that self-employed individuals who are more resilient coped better with the crisis.
Forced to stay at home
(2022)
The effects of COVID-19-related lockdowns on deterioration of mental health and use of exercise to remediate such effects has been well documented in numerous populations. However, it remains unknown how lockdown restrictions impacted individuals differently and who was more likely to change their exercise behavior and experience negative well-being. The current study examined exercise dependence as a risk factor and its impact on exercise behavior and mood during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns on a global scale in 11,898 participants from 17 countries. Mixed effects models revealed that reducing exercise behavior was associated with a stronger decrease in mood for individuals at risk of exercise dependence compared to individuals at low risk of exercise dependence. Participants at high risk and exercising more prior to the pandemic reported the most exercise during lockdown. Effects of lowered mood were most pronounced in participants with high risk of exercise dependence who reported greater reduction in exercise frequency during lockdown. These results support recent etiological evidence for exercise dependence and add to a growing body of literature documenting mental health effects related to COVID-19.
Boredom has been identified as one of the greatest psychological challenges when staying at home during quarantine and isolation. However, this does not mean that the situation necessarily causes boredom. On the basis of 13 explorative interviews with bored and non-bored persons who have been under quarantine or in isolation, we explain why boredom is related to a subjective interpretation process rather than being a direct consequence of the objective situation. Specifically, we show that participants vary significantly in their interpretations of staying at home and, thus, also in their experience of boredom. While the non-bored participants interpret the situation as a relief or as irrelevant, the bored participants interpret it as a major restriction that only some are able to cope with.
1,7 Milliarden Studierende waren von der ad hoc Umstellung der Lehre an Hochschulen durch den Ausbruch der COVID-19-Pandemie im Jahr 2020 betroffen. Innerhalb kürzester Zeit mussten Lehr- und Lernformate digital transformiert werden, um ein Distanzlernen für Studierende überall auf der Welt zu ermöglichen. Etwa zwei Jahre später können die Erfahrungen aus der Entwicklung von digitalen Lehr- und Lernformaten dazu genutzt werden, um Blended Learning Formate zielgerecht weiterzuentwickeln. Die nachfolgende Untersuchung zeigt einerseits einen Prozess der evolutionären Entwicklung am Beispiel eines Inverted Classrooms auf. Andererseits wird das Modell des Student Engagement genutzt, um die Einflussfaktoren, im Speziellen die des Verhaltens, zielgerecht anzupassen und so die Outcomes in Form von besseren Noten und einer erhöhten Zufriedenheit bei den Studierenden zu erzielen. Grundlage für die Untersuchung bildet die Lehrveranstaltung Projektmanagement, die an einer deutschen Hochschule durchgeführt wird.