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Studies and Advances to Evaluate the Impact of Epidemic Diseases...
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Studies and Advances to Evaluate the Impact of Epidemic Diseases in Modern Times

A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2021) | Viewed by 15426

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Alberto Fernández Isabel

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Research Group of Foundations and Applications of Data Science, Rey Juan Carlos University Madrid, 28933 Móstoles, Madrid, Spain
Interests: environment simulation; intelligent transportation systems; road traffic simulation; agent-based systems; medical fraud detection; social behaviour and interaction; knowledge-based systems
Prof. Dr. Isaac Martín De Diego

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Research Group of Foundations and Applications of Data Science, Rey Juan Carlos University Madrid, 28933 Móstoles, Madrid, Spain
Interests: data science; machine learning; biostatistics; knowledge-based systems; medical fraud detection; social behavior; computer vision
Dr. Juan Francisco Blanco Blanco

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute for Biomedical Research of Salamanca, Hospital Universitario de Salamanca, 37007 Salamanca, Spain
Interests: data science; biostatistics; public health; epidemic diseases; medical fraud detection; innovative medical treatments

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are currently experiencing an unprecedented situation across the world with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and its fast expansion, thousands of human beings have passed away, and millions have been infected. This situation has produced enormous pressure on the healthcare sector, with hospitals, medical resources, physicians, and nurses close to exhaustion. The main directive of governments of the hardest-hit countries has been to isolate the population. These restrictive and dramatic guidelines, implemented to control and reduce the advance of the virus, have arguably had a positive effect by saving thousands of lives, but they have not been without consequences, both on the individuals who have seen their lives upended in different ways and on the management of the largest cities, as well as the productive fabric of each country. In the former, restricting the mobility of a population has been shown as an effective method to reduce the evolution of the pandemic, but the produced psychological cost has not been considered in depth. In the latter, the considerable reduction of public transport services and the severe diminution of travel using personal vehicles have modified the organization of cities and impacted the demand for fuel, leading to significant reductions in fuel prices. Finally, at the economic level, most countries have experienced a reduction of more than 5% of their Gross Domestic Product, which represents a strong recession.

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) focuses on the current state of the knowledge of the diverse issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. New research papers, reviews, case reports, and extended conference papers are welcome to this issue. Other manuscript types accepted include methodological papers, position papers, brief reports, and commentaries.

We will accept manuscripts from different disciplines, including the healthcare domain, political and economic sciences, social and psychological sciences, computer science, transport management, and environmental science. Some of the most important areas include but are not limited to:

  1. Psychological effects in population due to the isolation process;
  2. Managing transport in cities during confinement;
  3. Influence related to SARS-CoV-2 exposure in public transport services;
  4. Statistical analysis of the evolution of the pandemic;
  5. Dynamic evaluation of medical resources during the pandemic wave;
  6. Environmental effects produced by the isolation of the population;
  7. Effects of the different guidelines adopted by affected countries;
  8. Related health problems associated with the COVID-19;
  9. Secondary effects of the virus in healed patients.
  10.   Political impact and cost related to the adopted countermeasures;
  11. Economic impact related to the reduction of activity during the outbreak;

Simulations of the virus spreading or its associated problems in any application domain.

Dr. Alberto Fernández Isabel
Prof. Dr. Isaac Martín De Diego
Dr. Juan Francisco Blanco Blanco
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • epidemic diseases
  • pandemic management
  • social simulation
  • environmental simulation
  • sanitary alarm management
  • transport management
  • social behavior
  • applied data science
  • distributed social models
  • decision support systems

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 2693 KiB  
Article
Hybrid Model-Based Simulation Analysis on the Effects of Social Distancing Policy of the COVID-19 Epidemic
by Bong Gu Kang, Hee-Mun Park, Mi Jang and Kyung-Min Seo
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(21), 11264; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111264 - 27 Oct 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1972
Abstract
This study utilizes modeling and simulation to analyze coronavirus (COVID-19) infection trends depending on government policies. Two modeling requirements are considered for infection simulation: (1) the implementation of social distancing policies and (2) the representation of population movements. To this end, we propose [...] Read more.
This study utilizes modeling and simulation to analyze coronavirus (COVID-19) infection trends depending on government policies. Two modeling requirements are considered for infection simulation: (1) the implementation of social distancing policies and (2) the representation of population movements. To this end, we propose an extended infection model to combine analytical models with discrete event-based simulation models in a hybrid form. Simulation parameters for social distancing policies are identified and embedded in the analytical models. Administrative districts are modeled as a fundamental simulation agent, which facilitates representing the population movements between the cities. The proposed infection model utilizes real-world data regarding suspected, infected, recovered, and deceased people in South Korea. As an application, we simulate the COVID-19 epidemic in South Korea. We use real-world data for 160 days, containing meaningful days that begin the distancing policy and adjust the distancing policy to the next stage. We expect that the proposed work plays a principal role in analyzing how social distancing effectively affects virus prevention and provides a simulation environment for the biochemical field. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Studies and Advances to Evaluate the Impact of Epidemic Diseases in Modern Times)
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20 pages, 7219 KiB  
Article
Detecting Emotional Evolution on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Text Analysis
by Javier Cabezas, Daniela Moctezuma, Alberto Fernández-Isabel and Isaac Martín de Diego
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(13), 6981; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18136981 - 29 Jun 2021
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 3278
Abstract
Early in 2020, an unexpected and hazardous situation occurred threatening and challenging all of humankind. A new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 was first identified in Wuhan, China, and its related disease, called COVID-19, has induced one of the most dangerous crises at a global [...] Read more.
Early in 2020, an unexpected and hazardous situation occurred threatening and challenging all of humankind. A new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 was first identified in Wuhan, China, and its related disease, called COVID-19, has induced one of the most dangerous crises at a global level since World War II. The ultra-fast transmission rate of the virus and the high mortality rate led the World Health Organization (WHO) to officially declare the situation a pandemic. Governments, for their part, were forced to implement unprecedented mobility restrictions and cease a large part of their economic activities. These facts triggered multiple reactions from people who expressed their feelings mainly through social networks (like Twitter), using them as vectors of information and opinion. In this paper, a study carried out in different Spanish speaking countries (Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Spain) is presented, which addresses the manner in which the evolution of the pandemic outbreak has affected the emotions expressed by individuals on Twitter over the last 13 months (from March 2020 to March 2021). We used a total of 3 million tweets to achieve this task. We made use of a well-known framework called EmoWeb to capture the dynamic variation in the sentimental value of pandemic-related words. The results reflect to what degree the pandemic and its derived problems have influenced and affected the population of the selected countries in different ways. The outcomes also illustrate the evolution over time of opinions published on Twitter regarding several topics related to COVID-19. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Studies and Advances to Evaluate the Impact of Epidemic Diseases in Modern Times)
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14 pages, 899 KiB  
Article
COVID-19 Pandemic Affects the Medical Students’ Learning Process and Assaults Their Psychological Wellbeing
by Marium Aftab, Alsaleem Mohammed Abadi, Shamsun Nahar, Razia Aftab Ahmed, Syed Esam Mahmood, Manik Madaan and Ausaf Ahmad
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(11), 5792; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18115792 - 28 May 2021
Cited by 23 | Viewed by 6545
Abstract
Background: With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, people are living within a milieu of stress, anxiety, and fear. Medical students are susceptible to these emotional injuries, but their psychological wellbeing and learning may further be assaulted by future uncertainties and altered teaching [...] Read more.
Background: With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, people are living within a milieu of stress, anxiety, and fear. Medical students are susceptible to these emotional injuries, but their psychological wellbeing and learning may further be assaulted by future uncertainties and altered teaching and training programs. Our objective was to find the extent of the psychological impact of the pandemic and the learning difficulties they are experiencing; Methodology: This cross-sectional study included 418 undergraduate and postgraduate medical students from all over the world. A questionnaire was uploaded in Google survey form. It included background characteristics, questions for psychiatric impact like PHQ-9, GAD-7, ZF-OCS, and questions for learning difficulties perceived in comparison to the pre-pandemic time. Results: Among participants, 34.9% of students were male and 65.1% female. Around 46.4% belonged to the WHO, Eastern Mediterranean region, 26.8% from South East Asia region, 17.5% from the region of America, 5.5% from the European region,2.2%from the Western Pacific region, and 1.7% from the African region. Symptoms due to psychiatric illness were noticed in 393 (93.1%); depression in 386 (92.3%), anxiety in 158 (37.8%), obsessive compulsion disorder in 225 (53.8%), and post-traumatic stress syndrome in 129 (39.9%). Female gender, geographical region, and history of previous psychiatric illness were significantly related to almost all the psychiatric illnesses. Regarding learning difficulty, 96% of students faced problems: trouble with memorizing in 54.0%, concentration problems in 67.0%, about 55.5% of students made more mistakes, while 44.5% noted an increase in reaction time for solving questions. In addition, 90% experienced greater difficulty in overall learning during the pandemic in comparison to the pre-pandemic time. Conclusion: Assault on psychological wellbeing, struggling to memorize, inattention and difficulty in concentration on studies, along with perceived overall trouble with learning, have emerged as collateral damage from the COVID-19 pandemic with respect to medical students. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Studies and Advances to Evaluate the Impact of Epidemic Diseases in Modern Times)
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21 pages, 1358 KiB  
Article
Health Sufficiency Indicators for Pandemic Monitoring
by Javier M. Moguerza, Salvador Perelló Oliver, Isaac Martín de Diego, Víctor Aceña, Carmen Lancho, Marina Cuesta and César González Fernández
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(10), 5358; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18105358 - 18 May 2021
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2863
Abstract
The outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, spreading all around the world and causing a worldwide pandemic, has lead to the collapse of the health systems of the most affected countries. Due to the ease of transmission, early prevention measures are proved to be [...] Read more.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, spreading all around the world and causing a worldwide pandemic, has lead to the collapse of the health systems of the most affected countries. Due to the ease of transmission, early prevention measures are proved to be fundamental to control the pandemic and, hence, the saturation of the health systems. Given the difficulty of obtaining characteristics of these systems of different countries and regions, it is necessary to define indicators based on basic information that enable the assessment of the evolution of the impact of a disease in a health system along with fair comparisons among different ones. This present paper introduces the Health Sufficiency Indicator (HSI), in its accumulated and daily versions. This indicator measures the additional pressure that a health care system has to deal with due to a pandemic. Hence, it allows to evaluate the capacity of a health system to give response to the corresponding needs arising from a pandemic and to compare the evolution of the disease among different regions. In addition, the Potential Occupancy Ratio (POR) in both its hospital ward bed and ICU bed versions is here introduced to asses the impact of the pandemic in the capacity of hospitals. These indicators and other well-known ones are applied to track the evolution of the impact of the disease on the Spanish health system during the first wave of the pandemic, both on national and regional levels. An international comparison among the most affected countries is also performed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Studies and Advances to Evaluate the Impact of Epidemic Diseases in Modern Times)
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