Facing COVID-19: Early Recognition and Triage Tool for Medical Treatment Facilities With Limited Resources

ABSTRACT Introduction Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading all over the world. Health systems around the globe have to deal with decreased capabilities and exhausted resources because of the surge of patients. The need to identify COVID-19 patients to achieve a timely opportunity to treat and isolate them is an ongoing challenge for health care professionals everywhere. A lack of testing capabilities forces clinicians to make the crucial initial decision on the basis of clinical findings and routine diagnostic laboratory test. This article reviews the current literature and presents a new adapted protocol for diagnosing and triaging COVID-19 patients. A special emphasis lies on the stepwise approach guiding the medical provider to a triage decision that is suitable for the individual patient and the situation of the local medical treatment facility. Materials and Methods On March 30, 2020, a PubMed based literature research on COVID-19 following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines was performed. A diagnostic and triage tool for COVID-19 was designed based on the major findings in the reviewed literature. Results After a selection process, focusing on the topics “epidemiology,” “clinical characteristics,” and “diagnostic tools,” 119 out of a total amount of 1,241 publications were selected to get an overview of the growing evidence. Conclusions The designed Early Recognition and Triage Tool enables the medical provider to use the applicable modules of the protocol for capabilities of the local setting to get the most appropriate diagnostic and triage done. The tool should give guidance for the initial approach until specific testing for the COVID-19 virus is available.

Estimation of a possibility to transform a technological complex of the liquidated coal mine into the data processing center (data-center)

Today, in order to develop a contemporary society, assimilation of the necessary knowledge and organization of information storage, processing and use are the vital tasks. For this purpose, information data centers are being created, which ensure the realization of these tasks at all levels - from national to individual. Accordingly, location, volume and operation speed of the data centers are changing. Any data center is a fairly costly enterprise, building it "from scratch" requires significant material investments and human resources. Therefore, today researches are aimed at reusing areas and buildings of the out-of-date enterprises and organizations with the exhausted resources, but which, due to the acceptable rate of wear and tear, can be transformed into the innovative enterprises. In Ukraine, it is planned to close a number of coal mines, and, as a result, a significant number of industrial areas suitable for the renovation use will be vacated. Organization of a data center based on the existing facilities of the liquidated coal mine is quite possible and advisable; information about this is given in the article. There are many examples (for example, the Europe's largest data center Lefdal Mine Datacenter in Norway) of the data centers created on the basis of the liquidated industrial enterprises which, after their appropriate adaptation and modification, meet all requirements of the international standard ANSI/TIA/EIA-942. In Ukraine, there are also similar projects (for example, the United DC data center), which can be effectively introduced into the infrastructure of any industrial enterprise to be liquidated. The authors of this article have proven that modern coal mines (in particular, their surface technological complex) are essentially suitable for transformation into a data center due to the existing engineering and transport infrastructure, their favorable location and the required protection. The authors also provide information about the structure of the data center, audit of the surface complex in order to determine "bottlenecks" (non-compliance with the requirements of the ANS/TIA/EIA-942 standard), prerequisites for creating a data center on its basis, principles of calculating degree of depreciation of buildings and areas required for data center layout.

Not So Moral Moral Responses to Media Entertainment?

The present contribution comments Art Raney’s article on the role of morality in emotional reactions to media entertainment. It dwells on Raney’s distinction between pleasure-based versus appreciation-based media entertainment. On a normative level, Raney seems to favor appreciation-based media entertainment over pleasure-based entertainment, because he presumes the latter one to result from more automatic, archaic and, overall, less desirable moral activity among users. Recalling and extending Raney’s arguments, the present article discuss the ambivalence of seemingly moral judgments of characters, the potential selfishness of users’ concern for the fate of the protagonist, and potential biases in the appraisals of justice restoration. However, the present article wrestles with Raney’s arguments underlying his critical evaluation of pleasure-based entertainment. While agreeing to most of his arguments about the moral mechanisms underlying pleasure-based entertainment, it departs from his normative position. The present article argues that pleasure-based entertainment may fulfill a psychologically functional role: it may allow people to effectively recreate and to restore exhausted resources.

Edward III and His Family

The chroniclers and poets of the later Middle Ages credited Edward III with many successes, among which the production of a large family rated highly. The king had a total of twelve children, of whom no fewer than nine—five sons and four daughters—survived to maturity (fig. 1). Historians have not always been enthusiastic about the generous provisions made for this large family. Edward's very fecundity, viewed by fourteenth-century writers as a sure sign of God's grace, has been seen as a political liability because it exhausted resources, created a political imbalance between the crown and the younger branches of the royal family, and led ultimately to the deposition of Richard II and the Wars of the Roses.It is possible, however, to view Edward III's family arrangements in a different and rather more favorable light. Since the loss of many of their overseas territories in the thirteenth century, the Plantagenet kings had come to regard their remaining possessions as an inalienable patrimony to be handed on intact from father to eldest son. Unless younger children were able to create titles for themselves in foreign lands, kings had no option but to reward their sons with English earldoms. This was not a policy guaranteed to benefit the crown: the bitter quarrels between Edward II and his cousin Thomas of Lancaster showed very clearly the dangers that might arise when cadet branches of the Plantagenet dynasty became bound up with the English aristocracy.