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Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an international public health threat, and people's participation in disease-related preventive behaviours is the key to controlling infectious diseases. This study aimed to assess the differences in adopting preventive behaviours among populations to explore potential individual and household factors and inequalities within families. Methods This online survey was conducted in April 2020. The directional stratified convenient sampling method was used to select 4704 participants from eight provinces in eastern, central, and western China. The questionnaire included demographic information, household variables, and five target prevention behaviours. The chi-squared test, binary multilevel model, and Mantel–Haenszel hierarchical analysis were used for data analysis in the study. Results Approximately 71.2% of the participants had appropriate outdoor prevention, and 32.9% of the participants had indoor protection in place. Sharing behaviours (P P P P P P OR = 1.53, 95% CI 1.09–2.15), women (OR = 1.37, 95% CI 1.15–1.64), and those with more than 2 suspected symptoms (OR = 1.85, 95% CI 1.07–3.19) were more likely to be affected by the inhibiting effect of household crowding, while the stimulating effect of high household income was limited in these groups. Conclusions Inequalities in COVID-19 prevention behaviours exist between families and inadequate adoption of prevention by vulnerable groups are noteworthy. This study expands the research perspective by emphasizing the role of household factors in preventive behaviours and by focusing on family inequalities. The government should use traditional media as a platform to enhance residents’ public health knowledge. Targeted additional wage subsidies, investments in affordable housing, financial support for multigenerational households, and temporary relocation policies may deserve more attention. Communities could play a critical role in COVID-19 prevention. Graphical abstract

The authors determined an error in the affiliation section; it was captured as Department of Hematology, Peking Union Hospital, CAMS & PUMC, Beijing 100,730, China. The correct affiliation should be Department of Hematology, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Science and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, 100730, China.

In many situations and domains it is important to deliver information to personnel as they work in the field. We consider a specialized content distribution application in wireless mesh networks. When a new mission arrives--for example, when a fire alarm sounds--data is pushed to storage nodes at the mission site where it may be retrieved locally by responding personnel (e.g., police, firefighters, paramedics, government officials, and the media). It is important that information is available at low latency, when requested or pulled by the personnel. The total latency experienced will be a combination of the push delay (if the personnel arrive at the mission site before all the data can be pushed), and the pull delay. Each delay component will in turn be a function of (1) the hop distance traveled by the data when pushed or pulled and (2) any congestion on the links. In this paper, we define algorithms and protocols that trade-off the push and pull latencies depending on the type of application. Our goal is to choose a storage node assignment minimizing the total latency-based cost. We start with a simple model in which cost is a function of distance, and then extend the model, explicitly taking congestion into account. Since the problem is NP-hard even to approximate, our focus is on developing efficient algorithms and distributed protocols that can be easily deployed in wireless mesh networks. In NS2 simulations, we find that our heuristic algorithms achieve, on average, a cost within at most 15% of the optimum.