COVID-19 Treatment: The Race Against Time

Education in Online Environment from Students’ and Teachers’ Perspective

The pandemic related to COVID-19 has affected education particularly in terms of the massive shift towards online teaching and study. Students and teachers had to face new challenges they had not met before. The aim of the paper is to research how both, students and teachers perceive the online educational process, to identify advantages and disadvantages of online teaching, as well as to analyze and evaluate the quality of online teaching in comparison with the attendance form of education from both students’ and teachers’ perspective. In order to fulfill this purpose, we carried out two separate questionnaire surveys (among students and teachers at the Faculty of Economic Informatics at the University of Economics in Bratislava). Based on conclusions resulting from our research, we can affirm that both students and teachers prefer the attendance form of education rather than online teaching, students mainly because of need of socialization, personal contact with teachers and classmates, better and faster communication with teachers, and active class discussion. The attendance form of education eliminates technology related problems, such as outages of the Internet, electricity, missing technology equipment, and this form of education is performed on higher quality level in comparison with online education. Among the most frequently limitations of online education mentioned by teachers were anonymity of students, complexity of preparation of study materials, and cheating during exams and tests. There are also some advantages the online education offers, such as time savings, more effective, creative and flexible modern way of teaching, and recording lectures.

Review of pharmacologic and immunologic agents in the management of COVID-19

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the third coronavirus outbreak in the last two decades. Emerging and re-emerging infections like COVID-19 pose serious challenges of the paucity of information and lack of specific cure or vaccines. This leaves utilisation of existing scientific data on related viral infections and repurposing relevant aetiologic and supportive therapies as the best control approach while novel strategies are developed and trialled. Many promising antiviral agents including lopinavir, ritonavir, remdesivir, umifenovir, darunavir, and oseltamivir have been repurposed and are currently trialled for the care for COVID-19 patients. Adjunct therapies for the management of symptoms and to provide support especially in severe and critically ill patients have also been identified. This review provides an appraisal of the current evidence for the rational use of frontline therapeutics in the management of COVID-19. It also includes updates regarding COVID-19 immunotherapy and vaccine development.

Classification of the present pharmaceutical agents based on the possible effective mechanism on the COVID-19 infection

OBJECTIVES

There are several types of research on the COVID-19 disease which have been conducting. It seems that prevailing over the pandemic would be achieved only by mastering over the virus pathophysiology. We tried to categorize the massive amount of available information for useful interpretation.

EVIDENCE ACQUISITION

We searched databases with different keywords and search strategies that focus on virulence and pathophysiology of COVID-19. The present review has aimed to gather and categorize all implemented drugs based on the susceptible virulence mechanisms, and the pathophysiological events in the host cells, discussing and suggesting treatments.

RESULTS

As a result, the COVID-19 lifecycle were categorized as following steps: "Host Cell Attachment" which is mainly conducted with ACE2 receptors and TMPRSS2 from the host cell and Spike (S) protein, "Endocytosis Pathway" which is performed mainly by clathrin-mediated endocytosis, and "Viral Replication" which contains translation and replication of RNA viral genome. The virus pathogenicity is continued by "Inflammatory Reactions" which mainly caused moderate to severe COVID-19 disease. Besides, the possible effective therapeutics' mechanism and the pharmaceutical agents that had at least one experience as a preclinical or clinical study on COVID-19 were clearly defined.

CONCLUSION

The treatment protocol would be occasional based on the stage of the infection and the patient situation. The cocktail of medicines, which could affect almost all mentioned stages of COVID-19 disease, might be vital for patients with severe phenomena. The classification of the possible mechanism of medicines based on COVID-19 pathogenicity.

Epdemiology of coronavirus disease 2020 (COVID-19) in Algeria

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was reported in Algeria on 25 February 2020. Since then the number of positive cases has reached 42 619, and 1465 deaths have occurred. The current manuscript aims to describe epidemiological indicators and the measures implemented to halt the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in Algeria. This work showed that the urgency in the implementation of containment measures has been associated with relative control of the epidemic despite two peaks in the epidemic curve, at the end of April and in mid-July. Since early August, the number of daily cases has decreased and the government has started a second step in relaxing containment.