Super-spreading Events and Contribution to Transmission of MERS, SARS, and COVID-19

There is no clear definition for the term ‘super-spreader’ or ‘super-spreading event’. The World Health Organization refers to a super-spreader as a patient (or an event) that may transmit infection to a larger number of individuals than is usual by one individual (or event). In the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) situation, a super-spreading event was defined as the transmission of SARS to at ≥8 contacts, and other authors defined this as individuals infecting an unusually large number of secondary cases [ 1 , 2 ]. A super-spreading event could merely be defined as an event in which one patient infects far more people than an average patient does, which is estimated by the basic reproduction number (R0)

Emergence of COVID-19 (formerly 2019-novel Coronavirus): a new threat from China

Coronaviruses cause diseases in birds, mammals, and humans, and were first identified in the mid-1960s (Lee, 2015; Bande et al., 2015; CDC, 2020). These viruses are named for the crown-like spikes on their surface (CDC, 2020). Based on the classification of the International Committee for Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) coronaviruses are from order Nidovirales, family Coronaviridae and subfamily Coronavirinae. The viruses contain a positive sense, single-stranded Ribonucleic acid (RNA) genome ranged from 26 to 32 kilobases (kb) in length and thus have the largest genomes for RNA viruses (van Regenmortel et al., 2000). These viruses are further divided into four main subgroups named alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. There are seven human coronaviruses cause infection in humans including 229E (alpha coronavirus), NL63 (alpha coronavirus), OC43 (beta coronavirus), HKU1 (beta coronavirus), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS (beta coronavirus), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS (beta coronavirus), and the newly identified 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) (CDC, 2020). Common symptoms of the disease include fever, cough, respiratory symptoms, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties (WHO, 2020)

Optimizing Scan Homogeneity for Building Full-3D Lidars based on Rotating a Multi-Beam Velodyne Rangefinder

Multi-beam lidar (MBL) scanners are compact, light, and accessible 3D sensors with high data rates, but they offer limited vertical resolution and field of view (FOV). Some recent robotics research has profited from the addition of a degree-of-freedom (DOF) to an MBL to build rotating multi-beam lidars (RMBL) that can achieve high-resolution scans with full spherical FOV. In a previous work, we offered a methodology to analyze the complex 3D scan measurement distributions produced by RMBLs with a rolling DOF and no pitching. In this paper, we investigate the effect of introducing constant pitch angles in the construction of the RMBLs with the purpose of finding a kinematic configuration that optimizes scan homogeneity with a spherical FOV. To this end, we propose a scalar index of 3D sensor homogeneity that is based on the spherical formulation of Ripley's K function. The optimization is performed for the widely used Puck (VLP-16) and HDL-32 sensors by Velodyne.This work was partially funded by the Spanish project {DPI2015-65186-R}. The publication has received support from Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Andalucía Tech

Chikungunya, Zika y otras Neuroarbovirosis: Importancia en América Latina

Durante los últimos 4 años, América Latina ha sido testigo de epidemias causadas por arbovirus, como ha sido el caso especialmente de chikungunya y Zika. Los arbovirus, virus transmitidos por artrópodos, tienen un impacto particular en zonas tropicales y subtropicales, por las importantes densidades de vectores como Aedes aegypti y Aedes albopictus, por condiciones ambientales y sociales, que, aunado a la globalización y el turismo, han permitido la llegada al continente desde diciembre 2013 (chikungunya). Viajeros infectados, sintomáticos o asintomáticos, que tienen estos virus ARN en la sangre (viremia), cuando llegan a zonas con el vector, son fuente para la generación de casos autóctonos. Esto fue lo que ocurrió en las islas del Caribe con chikungunya y luego en 2013-2015 en Brasil con Zika