Appraisal of Urban Sprawl in Mega Cities of Punjab Pakistan in context of Socio-Political Issues using RS/GIS.

Urbanization has become a hot issue in context of environmental and socio-political scenarios which is addressed at every forum internationally. The mega cities are considered the main origin of socio-economic development which caused to emerge a number of issues like biodiversity, environmental degradation, resource consumption, implementation of law and order and provision of basic facilities to the general public. The area under investigation consists of Lahore, Gujranwala and Sheikhupura. The study site was bounded by 73-75 E longitudes and 31-33 N latitudes. We used Landsat satellite data to map Spatio-temporal variations in urban sprawl from 1990 to 2019 with a temporal window of 15 years. The Landsat data is free, highly reliable and considered as primary source. The classification results show that the total area of study site was site was 29355 km2 including 21933km2 were green index 4595 km2 was under human settlements and 2827 km2 was the waterbody in 1990. The classification of Landsat image of the year 2005 describes that area of human settlements was increased to 9366 km2, the volume of water body was reduced to 2111km2 and the vegetation was also degraded to 17878km2. Again, the urban area was computed using satellite imagery for the year 2019 which was 16105km2 in 2019. Kappa stat proved the accuracy of supervised classification what was around 87%. Remotely sensed datasets proved the reliability of Landsat satellite images for estimation of urban sprawl during last three decades. Full Tex

ISARIC-COVID-19 dataset: A Prospective, Standardized, Global Dataset of Patients Hospitalized with COVID-19

The International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) COVID-19 dataset is one of the largest international databases of prospectively collected clinical data on people hospitalized with COVID-19. This dataset was compiled during the COVID-19 pandemic by a network of hospitals that collect data using the ISARIC-World Health Organization Clinical Characterization Protocol and data tools. The database includes data from more than 705,000 patients, collected in more than 60 countries and 1,500 centres worldwide. Patient data are available from acute hospital admissions with COVID-19 and outpatient follow-ups. The data include signs and symptoms, pre-existing comorbidities, vital signs, chronic and acute treatments, complications, dates of hospitalization and discharge, mortality, viral strains, vaccination status, and other data. Here, we present the dataset characteristics, explain its architecture and how to gain access, and provide tools to facilitate its use