A snapshot of the practicality and barriers to COVID-19 interventions: Public health and healthcare workers' perceptions in high and low- and middle-income countries

Building citizen science intelligence for outbreak preparedness and response: a mixed-method study in nine countries to assess knowledge, readiness and feasibility

INTRODUCTION

Citizen science (CS) is an emerging approach in public health to harness the collective intelligence of individuals to augment traditional scientific efforts. However, citizens' viewpoint, especially the hard-to-reach population, is lacking in current outbreak-related literature. We aim to understand the awareness, readiness and feasibility of outbreak-related CS, including digitally enabled CS, in low-income and middle-income countries.

METHODS

This mixed-method study was conducted in nine countries between October 2022 and June 2023. Recruitment through civil society targeted the general population, marginalised/indigenous groups, youth and community health workers. Participants (aged ≥18 years) completed a quantitative survey, and a subset participated in focus group discussions (FGDs).

RESULTS

2912 participants completed the survey and 4 FGDs were conducted in each country. Incorporating participants' perspectives, CS is defined as the practice of active public participation, collaboration and communication in all aspects of scientific research to increase public knowledge, create awareness, build trust and facilitate information flow between citizens, governments and scientists. In Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cameroon and Kenya, majority were unaware of outbreak-related CS. In India and Uganda, majority were aware but unengaged, while in Nepal and Zimbabwe, majority participated in CS before. Engagement approaches should consider different social and cultural contexts, while addressing incentivisation, attitudes and practicality factors. Overall, 76.0% expressed interest in digital CS but needed training to build skills and confidence. Digital CS was perceived as convenient, safer for outbreak-related activities and producing better quality and quantity of data. However, there were concerns over non-inclusion of certain groups, data security and unclear communication.

CONCLUSION

CS interventions need to be relatable and address context-specific factors influencing CS participation. Digital CS has the potential to facilitate collaboration, but capacity and access issues must be considered to ensure inclusive and sustainable engagement.

Nurses' Work-Family Strategies during COVID-19 Lockdown and Their Association with Individual Health and Family Relations

The COVID-19 lockdown forced people to stay at home and address their family duties more equally. However, since nurses themselves were involved in the closed-loop management in hospitals and unable to return home, there was also an increased likelihood of non-traditional work-family strategies emerging. To ascertain the extant and implications of this phenomenon, this cross-sectional study explores work-family management strategies among nurses during the COVID-19 lockdown and their association with nurses' individual health, family relationships, and job performance. Survey data were collected from 287 nurses who were involved in the closed-loop management in Shanghai hospitals from March to June 2022. Latent Class Analysis of seven categorical variables of nurses' work-family status (e.g., the division of childcare labor) produced a best-fit solution of five strategies (BLRT (p) < 0.001, LMR (p) = 0.79, AIC = 5611.34, BIC = 6302.39, SSA-BIC = 5703.65, Entropy = 0.938): (1) fully outsourcing to grandparents, (2) partially outsourcing to grandparents, with the husband filling in the gap, (3) the husband does it all, (4) egalitarian remote workers, and (5) a neo-traditional strategy. Nurses who applied the egalitarian strategy had less psychological distress and relationship tension and better performance than those who applied the neo-traditional strategy and performed most of the childcare. The "husband does it all" strategy and the outsourcing strategies seem to have double-edged effects, with better job performance and family relations but also more distress and fewer sleeping hours among nurses. Overall, with a view to future risk mitigation, policymakers and practitioners should be aware of the diversity of the work-family strategies among nurse families during the lockdown period, and their association with individual and family outcomes, and provide tailored support.

Meditation-induced bloodborne factors as an adjuvant treatment to COVID-19 disease

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Management of the pandemic has relied mainly on SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, while alternative approaches such as meditation, shown to improve immunity, have been largely unexplored. Here, we probe the relationship between meditation and COVID-19 disease and directly test the impact of meditation on the induction of a blood environment that modulates viral infection. We found a significant inverse correlation between length of meditation practice and SARS-CoV-2 infection as well as accelerated resolution of symptomology of those infected. A meditation "dosing" effect was also observed. In cultured human lung cells, blood from experienced meditators induced factors that prevented entry of pseudotyped viruses for SARS-CoV-2 spike protein of both the wild-type Wuhan-1 virus and the Delta variant. We identified and validated SERPINA5, a serine protease inhibitor, as one possible protein factor in the blood of meditators that is necessary and sufficient for limiting pseudovirus entry into cells. In summary, we conclude that meditation can enhance resiliency to viral infection and may serve as a possible adjuvant therapy in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A call for citizen science in pandemic preparedness and response: beyond data collection

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need to partner with the community in pandemic preparedness and response in order to enable trust-building among stakeholders, which is key in pandemic management. Citizen science, defined here as a practice of public participation and collaboration in all aspects of scientific research to increase knowledge and build trust with governments and researchers, is a crucial approach to promoting community engagement. By harnessing the potential of digitally enabled citizen science, one could translate data into accessible, comprehensible and actionable outputs at the population level. The application of citizen science in health has grown over the years, but most of these approaches remain at the level of participatory data collection. This narrative review examines citizen science approaches in participatory data generation, modelling and visualisation, and calls for truly participatory and co-creation approaches across all domains of pandemic preparedness and response. Further research is needed to identify approaches that optimally generate short-term and long-term value for communities participating in population health. Feasible, sustainable and contextualised citizen science approaches that meaningfully engage affected communities for the long-term will need to be inclusive of all populations and their cultures, comprehensive of all domains, digitally enabled and viewed as a key component to allow trust-building among the stakeholders. The impact of COVID-19 on people’s lives has created an opportune time to advance people’s agency in science, particularly in pandemic preparedness and response.