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Rationale: India and the USA, the worst affected countries by COVID-19, experienced very different pandemic courses. By 2020, COVID-19 cases had steadily declined in India, whereas the fight continued in the US. The people of India and the USA perhaps perceived threats very differently, influenced by their knowledge, available healthcare facilities, and social security. We conducted an online survey study to compare COVID-related perceptions between Indian participants (IND-P) and US-based participants (US-P).Methods: COVID-related perceptions such as stress, knowledge, and preventive behaviors were measured with specific questionnaires, and normalized scores were computed. T-tests were used to compare the perception scores, while the Kruskal-Wallis-H (KWH) tests were used to compare socioeconomic distributions between participants from two countries. Generalized linear model (GLM) adjusted for sociodemographic confounders estimated the association between the country of residence and COVID-perception.Results: The IND-P (N = 242) were younger and male-dominated compared with the US-P (N = 531) (age: KWH = 97.37, p < 0.0001, gender: KWH = 140.38, p < 0.0001). Positive attitudes toward preventive guidelines were associated with higher perceived risk and stress (r = 0.35, p < 0.001, and r = 0.21, p < 0.001, respectively) but not with the knowledge (r = −0.05, p = 0.14). Compared with the US-P, the IND-P had lower knowledge (5.19 ± 1.95 vs. 7.82 ± 1.35; t-test: p < 0.0001), higher stress (7.01 ± 1.51 vs. 6.07 ± 1.61; t-test: p < 0.0001), and better adherence to preventive guidelines (8.84 ± 1.30 vs. 8.34 ± 2.09; t-test: p = 0.0006). GLM demonstrated a significant association between the country and COVID-perception scores.Conclusion: The IND-P experienced higher stress and perceived threat during COVID-19 than the US-P, perhaps due to a lack of faith in the healthcare system and insecurity. Despite lower knowledge, the IND-P had better acceptance of preventive guidelines than the US-P.

Snakes bite children in tropical countries at play, during family activities, and in agricultural communities when children start perform adult activities. They cause a significant morbidity of limb loss as well as mortality. When the snake is identified correctly and specific anti-venom is available, these bites can be treated specifically; however, this is often not the case and the clinician is left to treat symptomatically or provide management based on the most common venom in the patient's geographic area. This article presents the types of snakes by geography and clinical manifestations to allow the clinician to appropriately treat the patient even when specific identification is not possible. We review the anti-venoms available and where they can be obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a systematic study of input and multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems behavior in an indoor environment in the presence of deterministic and random human movement between transmitter and receiver array. The in-house built MIMO-OFDM packet transmission demonstrator, equipped with four transmitters and four receivers, has been utilized to perform channel measurements at 5.2 GHz. Measurements have been performed using 0-3 pedestrians with different antenna arrays (2 x 2, 3 x 3 and 4 x 4). Regular significant temporal variation has been observed for random scenarios compared to the deterministic scenarios. An incremental trend in average channel capacity for both deterministic and random pedestrian movements has been observed as a function of the number of the pedestrian and antennas. The 90% dynamic range analysis also reserved the incremental affinity with the increasing number of pedestrian and antenna combinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]