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)

FRATERNIDAD PARA LA VIDA DIGNA DE LOS PUEBLOS.(FRATERNITY FOR A WORTHY LIFE OF PEOPLES)

El presente texto pretende relacionar algunas líneas y rutas de análisis como aportes al debate que viene resurgiendo en Latinoamérica en torno al tercer componente no desarrollado de la modernidad: La Fraternidad. Para ello se hará referencia al concepto desde una dimensión política, propia de la modernidad y a la propuesta de la filosofía franciscana.AbstractThis text aims to connect some lines and routes of analysis as contribution to the debate which is reappearing in Latin America around the third non-developed component of modernity: Fraternity. That is why it will be approached from a political dimension, which is proper to modernity and the proposal of Franciscan philosophy

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)

IS PLAGUE GLOBALLY REEMERGING?

Emerging and reemerging diseases are cause of concern for the World Health Organization (WHO). On February 2018, WHO releases its list of priority pathogens that have the potential to cause a public health emergency, given that for them there is no, or is insufficient, countermeasures, such as drugs and vaccines that help control outbreaks. During the last years, the world has experienced recent significant outbreaks of plague, an infection caused by Yersinia pestis and transmitted by fleas. In Africa, Madagascar,2-4 suffered during 2017 an outbreak, from the August 1 through November 22, 2017, with a total of 2348 confirmed, probable and suspected cases, including 202 deaths (case fatality rate [CFR] 8.6%). There were 1791 cases of pneumonic plague, of which 22% were confirmed

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