• Korean Journal of Schizophrenia Research
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.45-51
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• 2021

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has drastically impacted our society and health care system. People with schizophrenia are more vulnerable to this burden of illness and related societal changes. In addition, they are more susceptible to the transmission of COVID-19 and have a significantly higher mortality rate compared to the general population. In a recent study, vaccinated patients with schizophrenia showed a greatly decreased mortality level similar to that of the general population. However, patients with schizophrenia were less likely to be vaccinated. Mental health professionals should provide them with appropriate information on prevention strategies against COVID-19 and vaccination. Long-lasting social distancing and social disconnection can make people with schizophrenia more vulnerable to loneliness and depression. Furthermore, patients with schizophrenia may face challenges continuing psychiatric treatment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social support and suitable mental health services using novel technologies should be developed and provided to patients with schizophrenia.

• Nonlinear Functional Analysis and Applications
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.473-495
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• 2023

The use of mathematical modelling in the study of epidemiological disorders continues to grow substantially. In order to better support global policy initiatives and explain the possible consequence of an outbreak, mathematical models were constructed to forecast how epidemic illnesses spread. In this paper, fractional derivatives and (${\varpi}$ - F_𝓒)-contractions are used to explore the existence and uniqueness solutions of the novel coronavirus-19 model.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.63 no.7
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• pp.239-250
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• 2020

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading globally. Although its etiologic agent is discovered as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), there are many unsolved issues in COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The causes of different clinical phenotypes and incubation periods among individuals, species specificity, and cytokine storm with lymphopenia as well as the mechanism of damage to organ cells are unknown. It has been suggested that in viral pneumonia, virus itself is not a direct cause of acute lung injury; rather, aberrant immune reactions of the host to the insults from viral infection are responsible. According to its epidemiological and clinical characteristics, SARS-CoV-2 may be a virus with low virulence in nature that has adapted to the human species. Current immunological concepts have limited ability to explain such unsolved issues, and a presumed immunopathogenesis of COVID-19 is presented under the protein-homeostasis-system hypothesis. Every disease, including COVID-19, has etiological substances controlled by the host immune system according to size and biochemical properties. Patients with severe pneumonia caused by SARS-CoV-2 show more severe hypercytokinemia with corresponding lymphocytopenia than patients with mild pneumonia; thus, early immunomodulator treatment, including corticosteroids, has been considered. However, current guidelines recommend their use only for patients with advanced pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome. Since the immunopathogenesis of pneumonia may be the same for all patients regardless of age or severity and the critical immune-mediated lung injury may begin in the early stage of the disease, early immunomodulator treatment, including corticosteroids and intravenous immunoglobulin, can help reduce morbidity and possibly mortality rates of older patients with underlying conditions.

• BMB Reports
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.191-205
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• 2020

The unexpected pandemic set off by the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has caused severe panic among people worldwide. COVID-19 has created havoc, and scientists and physicians are urged to test the efficiency and safety of drugs used to treat this disease. In such a pandemic situation, various steps have been taken by the government to control and prevent the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This pandemic situation has forced scientists to rework strategies to combat infectious diseases through drugs, treatment, and control measures. COVID-19 treatment requires both limiting viral multiplication and neutralizing tissue damage induced by an inappropriate immune reaction. Currently, various diagnostic kits to test for COVID-19 are available, and repurposing therapeutics for COVID-19 has shown to be clinically effective. As the global demand for diagnostics and therapeutics continues to rise, it is essential to rapidly develop various algorithms to successfully identify and contain the virus. This review discusses the updates on specimens/samples, recent efficient diagnostics, and therapeutic approaches to control the disease and repurposed drugs mainly focusing on chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma (CP). More research is required for further understanding of the influence of diagnostics and therapeutic approaches to develop vaccines and drugs for COVID-19.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.16.1-16.14
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• 2023

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a viral infection produced by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus epidemic, which was declared a global pandemic in March 2020. The World Health Organization has recorded around 43.3 billion cases and 59.4 million casualties to date, posing a severe threat to global health. Severe COVID-19 indicates viral pneumonia caused by the SARS-CoV-2 infections, which can induce fatal consequences, including acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The purpose of this research is to better understand the COVID-19 and ARDS pathways, as well as to find targeted single nucleotide polymorphism. To accomplish this, we retrieved over 100 patients' samples from the Sequence Read Archive, National Center for Biotechnology Information. These sequences were processed through the Galaxy server next generation sequencing pipeline for variant analysis and then visualized in the Integrative Genomics Viewer, and performed statistical analysis using t-tests and Bonferroni correction, where six major genes were identified as DNAH7, CLUAP1, PPA2, PAPSS1, TLR4, and IFITM3. Furthermore, a complete understanding of the genomes of COVID-19-related ARDS will aid in the early identification and treatment of target proteins. Finally, the discovery of novel therapeutics based on discovered proteins can assist to slow the progression of ARDS and lower fatality rates.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.8.1-8.17
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• 2021

The global crisis caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to the most significant economic loss and human deaths after World War II. The pathogen causing this disease is a novel virus called the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2). As of December 2020, there have been 80.2 million confirmed patients, and the mortality rate is known as 2.16% globally. A strategy to protect a host from SARS-CoV-2 is by suppressing intracellular viral replication or preventing viral entry. We focused on the spike glycoprotein that is responsible for the entry of SARS-CoV-2 into the host cell. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration/EU Medicines Agency authorized a vaccine and antibody to treat COVID-19 patients by emergency use approval in the absence of long-term clinical trials. Both commercial and academic efforts to develop preventive and therapeutic agents continue all over the world. In this review, we present a perspective on current reports about the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 as a therapeutic target.

• Korean Medical Education Review
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.154-159
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• 2021

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has profoundly impacted all aspects of undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing medical education. Only the focus of medical education-care for patients and communities-has remained an integral part of all of the above sectors. Several challenges have been experienced by learners and educators as the education and training of future doctors has continued in the midst of this crisis, including the cancellation of face-to-face classes and training, reduced patient encounter opportunities, fairness issues in online assessments, disruption of patient interview-based exams, reflections on the role of doctors in society, and mental health-related problems linked to isolation and concerns about infection. In response to these disruptions, educators and institutions have rapidly deployed educational innovations. Schools have adopted educational strategies to overcome these challenges by implementing novel education delivery methods in an online format, providing clinical experiences through simulation or telehealth methods, introducing online assessment tools with formative purposes, encouraging learners' involvement in nonclinical activities such as community service, and making available resources and programs to sustain learners' mental health and wellness. During the COVID-19 pandemic, educators and institutions have faced drastic changes in medical education worldwide. At the same time, the quantitative expansion of online education has caused other problems, such as the lack of human collaboration. The long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical education need to be studied further.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.14.1-14.6
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• 2021

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an on-going pandemic disease infecting millions of people across the globe. Recent reports of reduction in antibody levels and the re-emergence of the disease in recovered patients necessitated the understanding of the pandemic at the core level. The cases of multiple organ failures emphasized the consideration of different organ systems while managing the disease. The present study employed RNA sequencing data to determine the disease associated differentially regulated genes and their related protein interactions in several organ systems. It signified the importance of early diagnosis and treatment of the disease. A map of protein interactions of multiple organ systems was built and uncovered CAV1 and CTNNB1 as the top degree nodes. A core interactions sub-network was analyzed to identify different modules of functional significance. AR, CTNNB1, CAV1, and PIK3R1 proteins were unfolded as bridging nodes interconnecting different modules for the information flow across several pathways. The present study also highlighted some of the druggable targets to analyze in drug re-purposing strategies against the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the protein interactions map and the modular interactions of the differentially regulated genes in the multiple organ systems would incline the scientists and researchers to investigate in novel therapeutics for the COVID-19 pandemic expeditiously.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.1128-1145
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• 2022

Owing to the rapid development of information science, data analysis based on machine learning has become an interdisciplinary and strategic area. Marine predators algorithm (MPA) is a novel metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the foraging strategies of marine organisms. Considering the randomness of these strategies, an improved algorithm called co-evolutionary cultural mechanism-based marine predators algorithm (CECMPA) is proposed. Through this mechanism, search agents in different spaces can share knowledge and experience to improve the performance of the native algorithm. More specifically, CECMPA has a higher probability of avoiding local optimum and can search the global optimum quickly. In this paper, it is the first to use CECMPA to perform feature subset selection and optimize hyperparameters in support vector machine (SVM) simultaneously. For performance evaluation the proposed method, it is tested on twelve datasets from the university of California Irvine (UCI) repository. Moreover, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can be a real-world application and is spreading in many countries. CECMPA is also applied to a COVID-19 dataset. The experimental results and statistical analysis demonstrate that CECMPA is superior to other compared methods in the literature in terms of several evaluation metrics. The proposed method has strong competitive abilities and promising prospects.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.286-293
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• 2022

Background: The death rate of workers due to industrial accidents in South Korea (3.61 persons in 2017) is higher than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average (2.43) and the fifth highest among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries. Although the pandemic of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has changed, the socioeconomic aspects of Korean society, the number of Koreans suffering accidents and the number of deaths in 2020 have increased. It is necessary to take measures to prevent accidents and make comprehensive efforts to return to work. This study proposes research questions about the effect of workers' positive perception on whether to work after accidents and the impact of the experience of rehabilitation services on the return to work. Methods: This research performed a panel logistic regression analysis using data on workers' compensation insurance in Korea for two years (2018-2019). Results: This research finds that workers' positive perceptions of workability and life satisfaction contributed affirmatively to their re-employment. Several factors related to employment (e.g., work period, the number of job qualifications) also positively affect their return to work. However, the experience of rehabilitation services did not have a significant effect on re-employment. The variables of their health conditions (e.g., disability grade, feelings of health problems, age) negatively influenced their return to jobs. Conclusion: These results suggest the importance of workers' mental recovery and the need to innovate rehabilitation services for their employment. Positive thinking and self-rehabilitation could be critical for workers, parallel with social welfare policies.