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Several associations between the built environment and COVID-19 case distribution have been identified in previous studies. However, few studies have explored the non-linear associations between the built environment and COVID-19 at the community level. This study employed the March 2022 Shanghai COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to examine the association between built-environment characteristics and the incidence of COVID-19. A non-linear modeling approach, namely the boosted regression tree model, was used to investigate this relationship. A multi-scale study was conducted at the community level based on buffers of 5-minute, 10-minute, and 15-minute walking distances. The main findings are as follows: (1) Relationships between built environment variables and COVID-19 case distribution vary across scales of analysis at the neighborhood level. (2) Significant non-linear associations exist between built-environment characteristics and COVID-19 case distribution at different scales. Population, housing price, normalized difference vegetation index, Shannon's diversity index, number of bus stops, floor-area ratio, and distance from the city center played important roles at different scales. These non-linear results provide a more refined reference for pandemic responses at different scales from an urban planning perspective and offer useful recommendations for a sustainable COVID-19 post-pandemic response., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Gao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Recently, global climate change has led to a high incidence of extreme weather and natural disasters. How to reduce its impact has become an important topic. However, the studies that both consider the disaster's real-time geographic information and environmental factors in severe rainstorms are still not enough. Volunteered geographic information (VGI) data that was generated during disasters offered possibilities for improving the emergency management abilities of decision-makers and the disaster self-rescue abilities of citizens. Through the case study of the extreme rainstorm disaster in Zhengzhou, China, in July 2021, this paper used machine learning to study VGI issued by residents. The vulnerable people and their demands were identified based on the SOS messages. The importance of various indicators was analyzed by combining open data from socio-economic and built-up environment elements. Potential safe areas with shelter resources in five administrative districts in the disaster-prone central area of Zhengzhou were identified based on these data. This study found that VGI can be a reliable data source for future disaster research. The characteristics of rainstorm hazards were concluded from the perspective of affected people and environmental indicators. The policy recommendations for disaster prevention in the context of public participation were also proposed.

A highly sensitive silver staining method for protein bands or immunoprecipitates in electrophoresis or immunoelectrophoresis of unconcentrated cerebrospinal fluid using the commercial agarose plates (Corning Universal System) has been established. The new method is based on the reaction between protein-potassium ferrocyanide complex and silver nitrate as is the conventional silver staining in agar gel electrophoresis. However, some modifications were introduced into the procedures in order to obtain the densitometric values of fractionated proteins coincident with those by the usual amidoblack 10B staining for the same concentrated samples. Furthermore, in immunoelectrophoresis, several minor component proteins which could not be found by the usual staining have been detected in the cerebrospinal fluid samples.