Assessment of Antibiotic Resistance Pattern of Bacteria Prevalent during COVID-19 Pandemic

Owing to disparities in the intensity of the breakouts, state and federal regulations, accessible means, cultural elements, and social consciousness, the global reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has been varied. The COVID-19 pandemic, on the other hand, has had an impact on all parts of society, notably efforts to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The pandemic has highlighted that a greater burden on medical infrastructure can contribute to higher, often unnecessary antibiotic usage and a de-prioritization of antimicrobial stewardship and surveillance (AMS). The focus of this research is to see if there is a growth in antibiotic resistance during the covid-19 pandemic in the King Salman Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and to investigate the subcomponent that leads to antibiotic resistance. This is a comprehensive review of patients hospitalized at the King Salman Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who were admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, which occurred between March and August 2020. An analysis of the case dataset was performed to determine the rise in antibiotic resistance and relate it to resistant cases before the pandemic (September 2019 to February 2020). Before and throughout the pandemic, fifteen kinds of bacteria were found, with K. pneumonia being the most prevalent bacteria (49; 30.6%), and Ac. Baum/haem being the most removable bacteria during the pandemic (74; 37.3%). Cephalosporin antibiotics, in notably cefotaxime and ceftazidime (100%), cefazolin (96.3%), ceftriaxone (96%), cefuroxime and ceftazidime (95%), cefotaxime ((94.7%). These antibiotics also had the same amount of resistance during the pandemic. In pre-covid-19 and during covid-19, these findings were congruent with the penicillin antibiotics class, ampicillin, and piperacillin (96.3% and 92.1%), accordingly. It is presently uncertain if COVID-19 patients would develop new or growing antibiotic resistance in locations with low historical prevalence, but this should be investigated in retrospective and future clinical and microbiology research.

A Shift Towards Digital and Participatory Performance Practice Post-Pandemic

This perspective analyses and reflects upon the experience of conceiving, curating and participating in Bodies:On:Live Magdalena:On:Live, the first online multi-platform Magdalena Festival, bringing together digitally competent artists with creative roots in the immateriality of the internet, in dialogue about current shifts in performance making with performers, writers, and directors declaring their uneasiness towards online adaptations of live work. As part of the global reaction to the standstill brought about by the Covid pandemic, we argue that shifts in practice for women in contemporary theatre associated with the Magdalena network – whether as an attempt for immediate artistic survival or a conscious experimental choice – were not exclusively determined by the available sharing of technical knowledge, or by the need to increase awareness of the digital medium in order to gain experience of different working modalities, but served a participatory and social purpose. These conditions were surfacing due to the digital space manifesting as a specific format of gathering through the Zoom windows and other platforms, which framed the encounters within a democratic performance arena, making the boundaries between participation and spectatorship porous. Therefore, the shift provoked by the festival not only pertains to the aesthetic sphere, but it is dynamically and organically geared towards the recognition of new working contexts arising from the unsettling experience of ‘disembodiment’ – as an ontological paradox of the original in-person Magdalena festival - and the embedded argument of the creative use of new technologies for a more sustainable and accessible future of performance making, both live and digital. 

Decoding the global trend of “vaccine tourism” through public sentiments and emotions: does it get a nod on Twitter?

Purpose This paper aims to fill the major research gap prevalent in the tourism literature on the new form of tourism branching out from the COVID-19. While there are newspaper reports mentioning about the government’s reaction to vaccine tourism, there is no such study or report that tries to understand what the global masses feel about it; thus, a preliminary investigation of the social sentiment and emotion accruing around vaccine tourism on Twitter is carried out. Design/methodology/approach This exploratory study serves as a preliminary investigation of the social sentiment and emotion accruing around vaccine tourism on Twitter and tries to categorise them into eight basic emotions from Plutchik (1994) “wheel of emotions” as joy, disgust, fear, anger, anticipation, sadness, trust and surprise. The results are presented through data visualisation technique for analysis. The study makes use of R programming languages and the extensive packages offered on RStudio. Findings A total of 12,258 emotions were captured. It is evident that Vaccine Tourism has got maximum of positive sentiments (28.14%) which is almost double of the negative sentiment (14.05%). It is visible that the highest sentiment is “trust” (12.74%) and is followed by “fear” (8.97%). The least visible sentiment is “surprise” (4.32%). Polarity has been found for maximum tweets as positive (55.52%) which yet again surpasses negative polarity (33.7%), and neutral polarity is the least (10.67%). Research limitations/implications It can be said that people bear a positive emotion regarding vaccine tourism such as “trust” and “joy” which also denotes a positive sentiment score for testing polarity. But there are still concerns of high prices of the packages, fear-prevalent people to step out, and the uncertainty of right precautionary measures being taken still puts vaccine tourism under the radar of doubt with a fourth population having negative and neutral sentiments each. This is indicative with “fear” being the second highest emotion to the users. There are mixed emotions for vaccine tourism, but positive dominates the results. Practical implications The study attempts to see the global reaction on social media on vaccine tourism trend for giving food for thought to marketers. It can be said that Asians can be the target group. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study that addresses the new trend of “Vaccine Tourism” or attempts to understand the emotions and sentiments of people globally.

Polydisperse spray flame ignition by a pulsed heat flux

A mathematical analysis of the ignition of a polydisperse spray/air mixture by an infinite surface heated in a pulsed manner is presented. In contrast to previous work in the literature, the entire history of the ignition process is accounted for starting from the flame-embryo progenitor stage, through the thermal runaway stage to the final flame propagation stage. For tractability at the current stage, the chemical kinetics is taken to be that of a single global reaction. The spray is modeled using the sectional approach and the influence of fuel spray characteristics on ignition is determined. Good agreement was found between the theoretical predictions and full numerical simulations. Delay in ignition due to the build-up of vapor from the fuel droplets as well as heat loss to the droplets for evaporation are found to play a significant role under certain operating conditions. Comparison between the critical energy flux and the initial spray polydispersity revealed small differences for larger values of the pulse duration but more significant minor differences for smaller pulse durations. Despite these seemingly minor differences, it was shown that the initial spray polydispersity can have a critical influence on whether flame ignition will occur or fail, even for sprays having the same initial SMD.

Exploring Chemical Reaction Space With Reaction Difference Fingerprints and Parametric t-SNE

<div>Humans prefer visual representations for the analysis of large databases. In this work, we suggest a method for the visualization of the chemical reaction space. Our technique uses the t-SNE approach that is parameterized by a deep neural network (parametric t-SNE). We demonstrated that the parametric t-SNE combined with reaction difference fingerprints could provide a tool for the projection of chemical reactions onto a low-dimensional manifold for easy exploration of reaction space. We showed that the global reaction landscape, been projected onto a 2D plane, corresponds well with already known reaction types. The application of a pretrained parametric t-SNE model to new reactions allows chemists to study these reactions in a global reaction space. We validated the feasibility of this approach for two marketed drugs: darunavir and oseltamivir. We believe that our method can help to explore reaction space and will inspire chemists to find new reactions and synthetic ways. </div><div><br></div>

Exploring Chemical Reaction Space With Reaction Difference Fingerprints and Parametric t-SNE

<div>Humans prefer visual representations for the analysis of large databases. In this work, we suggest a method for the visualization of the chemical reaction space. Our technique uses the t-SNE approach that is parameterized by a deep neural network (parametric t-SNE). We demonstrated that the parametric t-SNE combined with reaction difference fingerprints can provide a tool for the projection of chemical reactions onto a low-dimensional manifold for easy exploration of reaction space. We showed that the global reaction landscape, been projected onto a 2D plane, corresponds well with already known reaction types. The application of a pretrained parametric t-SNE model to new reactions allows chemists to study these reactions on a global reaction space. We validated the feasibility of this approach for two marketed drugs: darunavir and oseltamivir. We believe that our method can help explore reaction space and inspire chemists to find new reactions and synthetic ways. </div><div><br></div>