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Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD)poses a serious threat to human health and carries a heavy burden of disease.The disease burden mainly includes traditional epidemiological indicators such as morbidity,disability rate,and mortality rate,as well as economic burden evaluation indicators such as direct economic burden,indirect economic burden,and intangible economic burden,as well as social/health burden evaluation indicators such as potential years of life reduction,disability adjusted life years,and quality adjusted life years.It summarized the existing methods for evaluating the burden of COPD diseases and proposed the following suggestions:(1)enriching economic burden research methods to comprehensively and accurately evaluate direct economic burden;(2)expanding the scope of economic burden research and improve the economic burden research of COPD;(3)strengthening information management and enhance the accuracy of disease burden data;(4)exploring multidimensional indicators and establish a COPD disease burden evaluation system;(5)strengthening relevant research and highlight the health economics advantages of traditional Chinese medicine intervention in COPD.It can provide references for establishing a COPD disease burden evaluation system and policy formulation.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant influence on the public mental health in a stealthy manner. Current efforts focus on alleviating the impacts of the disease on public health and economy, with the psychological effects due to COVID-19 largely ignored. In this paper, we analyze a mental health related dataset from the US to enhance our understanding of human reactions to the pandemic. We are particularly interested in providing quantitative characterization of the pandemic impact on the public mental health, on top of qualitative explorations. We employ the multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) method to deal with missing values and take the logistic regression with least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) method to identify risk factors for mental health. The analyses are conducted to a large scale of online survey data from 12 consecutive weeks, so that the longitudinal trend of the risk factors can be investigated. Our analysis results unveil evidence-based findings to identify the groups who are psychologically vulnerable to COVID-19. This study is useful to assist healthcare providers and policy makers to take steps for mitigating the pandemic effects on public mental health.

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has spread stealthily and presented a tremendous threat to the public. It is important to investigate the transmission dynamic of COVID-19 to help understand the impact of the disease on public health and economy. While a number of epidemic models have been available to study infectious diseases, they are in-adequate to describe the dynamic of COVID-19. In this paper, we develop a new epidemic model which utilizes a set of ordinary differential equations with unknown parameters to delineate the transmission process of COVID-19. Different from the traditional epidemic models, this model accounts for asymptomatic infections as well the lag between symptoms onset and the confirmation date of infection. We describe an estimation procedure for the unknown parameters in the proposed model by adapting the iterated filter-ensemble adjustment Kalman filter (IF-EAKF) algorithm to the reported number of confirmed cases. To assess the performance of our proposed model, we examine COVID-19 data in Quebec for the period of April 2, 2020 to May 10, 2020 and carry out sensitivity studies under a variety of assumptions. To reflect the transmission potential of an infected case, we derive the basic reproduction number from the proposed model. The estimated basic reproduction number suggests that the pandemic situation in Quebec for the period of April 2, 2020 to May 10, 2020 is not under control.

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been found to be caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, comprehensive knowledge of COVID-19 remains incomplete and many important features are still unknown. This manuscripts conduct a meta-analysis and a sensitivity study to answer the questions: What is the basic reproduction number? How long is the incubation time of the disease on average? What portion of infections are asymptomatic? And ultimately, what is the case fatality rate? Our studies estimate the basic reproduction number to be 3.15 with the 95% interval (2.41, 3.90), the average incubation time to be 5.08 days with the 95% confidence interval (4.77, 5.39) (in day), the asymptomatic infection rate to be 46% with the 95% confidence interval (18.48%, 73.60%), and the case fatality rate to be 2.72% with 95% confidence interval (1.29%, 4.16%) where asymptomatic infections are accounted for.

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Residual plastic film in soil destroys the soil structure and changes the normal transportation and distribution of water and nutrient. In this work, we compared experiments on soil containing residual plastic film with a control experiment to investigate how residual film affects the transportation and distribution of water and nitrate (NO3-) in wetted soil. The experiment used Mariotte bottle, water tube, and soil tank to test six levels of residual-film concentration varying from 0 to 720 kg/hm2 in the soil. The wetting front, soil water content, and nitrate concentrations were all measured, and the results showed that when the concentration of residual-film was less than 360 kg/hm2, more water and nitrate remained in the upper part of the wetted volume due to block of residual film. Excessive residues (>360 kg/hm2) resulted in obvious phenomenon of preferential flow, which increased the wetting distance, wetted volume, and water content in the lower part of the wetted volume and the concentration of nitrate at the boundary of the wetted volume. These results not only help us to understand the consequences of plastic-film-residues pollution in terms of water and nitrate movement, but also provide scientific support to the development and establishment of reasonable irrigation, fertilization and management systems for polluted farmland with differential mulch residual concentrations.

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Objective:To systematically evaluate the incidence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) syndrome in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and to provide a basis for the standard of COVID-19 syndrome differentiation.Methods:CNKI, China Medical Journal Network, PubMed and Embase databases were searched by computer, and TCM syndrome data of COVID-19 cross-sectional surveys and case series were collected from the establishment of the database to March 31st in 2020. Two researchers independently screened the literature, extracted relevant data such as TCM syndromes, and evaluated the quality of the literature according to the quality assessment tool recommended by the JBI Evidence-Based Health Care Center. Stata 14.0 software was used to perform a single-group Meta-analysis of TCM syndromes.Results:Thirteen cross-sectional studies and 5 case series studies were included, with a total of 2 139 patients. The analysis of the cross-sectional studies showed that the risk bias was higher in the identification, control and accuracy of the confounding factors, and the description of the reliability and validity of the outcome indicators was unclear. The analysis of the case series studies showed that the overall risk bias was small, but there was a lack of a comprehensive description of the assessment when selecting patients. A total of 33 TCM syndromes of COVID-19 were sorted out by combining the TCM syndromes with the same disease position and pathogenic syndrome in the included 18 literatures, and there were 10 types of TCM syndromes of which the number of occurrences was ≥50, the incidence rate was ≥10%, and had statistical significance [indicated that 95% confidence interval (95% CI) didn't cross the meaningless line 0], including cold dampness syndrome (469 cases, incidence rate was 28.2%, 95% CI was 5.9%-50.6%), damp heat syndrome (247 cases, incidence rate was 32.1%, 95% CI was 10.7%-53.6%), epidemic closed lung syndrome (228 cases, incidence rate was 28.9%, 95% CI was 12.5%-45.2%), pulmonary and spleen Qi deficiency syndrome (202 cases, incidence rate was 22.1%, 95% CI was 9.5%-34.7%), dampness stagnation lung syndrome (180 cases, incidence rate was 41.2%, 95% CI was 18.4%-64.1%), dampness obstructing lung and spleen syndrome (81 cases, incidence rate was 56.3%, 95% CI was 48.1%-64.4%), evil heat syndrome lung syndrome (76 cases, incidence rate was 31.1%, 95% CI was 25.3%-36.9%), dampness-blocking lung and stomach syndrome (70 cases, incidence rate was 13.4%, 95% CI was 10.4%-16.3%), heat poisoning lung closure syndrome (55 cases, incidence rate was 16.9%, 95% CI was 8.3%-25.5%), and Qi-Yin deficiency syndrome (53 cases, incidence rate was 13.7%, 95% CI was 2.7%-24.8%). Subgroup analysis showed that there were 6 types of TCM syndromes that met the above conditions in cross-sectional studies, namely cold and damp lung syndrome (200 cases, incidence rate was 20.9%, 95% CI was 12.6%-29.2%), damp heat syndrome (221 cases, incidence rate was 41.8%, 95% CI was 9.4%-74.2%), dampness-disease lung syndrome (120 cases, incidence rate was 41.4%, 95% CI was 8.6%-74.3%), lung and spleen Qi deficiency syndrome (115 cases, incidence rate was 19.2%, 95% CI was 6.8%-31.7%), heat-fever lung syndrome (76 cases, incidence rate was 31.1%, 95% CI was 25.3%-36.9%) and Qi-Yin deficiency syndrome (53 cases, incidence rate was 13.7%, 95% CI was 2.7%-24.8%). There were 3 kinds of TCM syndromes in case series studies, which were virus closed lung syndrome (133 cases, incidence rate was 44.0%, 95% CI was 24.5%-63.4%), lung and spleen Qi deficiency syndrome (87 cases, incidence rate was 38.7%, 95% CI was 32.3%-45.0%), and dampness and depression lung syndrome (60 cases, incidence rate was 40.6%, 95% CI was 29.3%-52.0%). Conclusions:The TCM syndromes of COVID-19 syndrome were widely distributed and complex. The main TCM syndromes were cold dampness syndrome, damp heat syndrome, epidemic closed lung syndrome, pulmonary and spleen Qi deficiency syndrome, dampness stagnation lung syndrome, dampness obstructing lung and spleen syndrome, evil heat syndrome lung syndrome, dampness-blocking lung and stomach syndrome, heat poisoning lung closure syndrome, Qi-Yin deficiency syndrome, which can provide reference for the standard of TCM syndrome differentiation of COVID-19.

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Plastic film has become an important agriculture production material in recent years. Over the past three decades, the amount and application area of plastic film have increased steadily, and in 2014, which are 1.4 million tons and more than 180 million hm² respectively. It plays a key role for ensuring the supply of agricultural goods in China. Meanwhile, plastic film residual pollution becomes more and more serious, and in some regions, the amount of plastic film residues has reached over 250 kg/hm². In part of the Northwest region, soil structure of farmland has been destroyed by plastic film residues and then crop growth and farming operations were suppressed. It is recognized as a good choice to replace plastic film with biodegradable plastic film, an effective measure to solve the plastic film residue pollution. Now, it is in a critical stage of study and assessment of biodegradable plastic film in China and fortunately some biodegradable plastic films show effects in the production of potatoes, peanuts and tobacco. Overall, a series of challenges has still been faced by the biodegradable plastic film, mainly including improving the quality of biodegradable plastic products, such as tensile strength, flexibility, improving the controllability of rupture and degradation, enhancing the ability of increasing soil temperature and preserving soil moisture, and to satisfy the demand of crops production with mulching. In addition, it is essential to reduce the cost of the biodegradable film and promote the application of biodegradable film on large-scale. With the development of biodegradable plastic technology and agricultural production environment, the application of the biodegradable film will have a good future.

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