COVID-19 – Role of Government Intervention

The ravage of COVID-19 has remained unprecedented in the history of human civilization. The pandemic has bewildered the governments across the nations amidst the twin edge blade of economic stringency or unabated growth of the disease. The study has attempted to find the efficacy of GovernmentIntervention (GI) incombating the forces of the pandemic. Ithas pooled historical data of victims of 13 most affected countries after smoothening the data with ARIMA(p,q,r) technique to formulate an exponential model for its spread. The model considers six explanatory variables including GI to understand the dynamics of the disease. The historical data of the countries pooled across continents to have six groups. While variance inflation factorused for detecting multicollinearity, multivariate regression model adopted to determine the association between the explanatory variables and COVID-19 growth. The study pivoted on finding the role of GI, looking at its association with COVID-19 spread. Comparability analysis of the coefficient of GI conducted across the models to find the intensity across the continents. The study finds GI an effective instrument in the continents of America (North), America (South) and Asia, conducive for buying time for herd immunity and invention of vaccine and/or medicine

COVID-19: Finding the End Day

The study has pivoted on finding a methodology to forecast the end day of the menace of Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) or such pandemic that the planet faces on and often, challenging the core of the civilization. This model has resort to an indirect method to find the end day. As the pandemic grows exponentially, the rate of growth of total cases over previous day reduces asymptotically with herd immunity gaining strength to strength. Instead of finding flat head of the exponential expansion path, the model has looked into close to zero value of daily growth rate to find the end day. ARIMA (p,q,r) model for data smoothing and exponential trend line methodology adopted to find the end day. COVID-19 data for 63 days from March 20, 2020 to May 21, 2020 for seven countries and the globe explored with the proposed methodology. The study has projected toll of COVID-19 using a continuous constant exponential growth/decay model. The end day of the pandemic is projected for the globe when the expansion of the disease would be 0.01% per day. The methodology can be improved further by inclusion of other parameters of social and virology implications

Levels of serum lithium in manic depressive patients with mild persistent bronchial asthma

Background: Lithium, widely used in manic depressive (MD) patients, might protect the airways against constrictor stimuli in bronchial asthma (BA), through its effects on cell signal transduction and ion transport pathways.Methods: Serum lithium levels were studied in MD patients with better controlled mild persistent BA (group A) and MD patients with not so well controlled BA (group B).Results: Serum lithium levels were highly significantly more in group A compared to lithium levels in group B.Conclusions: Lithium may inhibit the contractile response of airway smooth muscle and can be used in treatment / monitoring of BA