This collection pulls together research output and scholarly activities from March 2020 and on focusing on COVID-19 by Kent State University faculty, researchers and scholars. Full-text is provided when copyright allows.
If you are a KSU researcher and are interested in having your work included in this collection, please contribute content here: https://oaks.kent.edu/submit
Alternately, you can also email the OAKS team at oaks@kent.edu with publication information.
Browse the Kent State University COVID-19 research and funded grants Collections
ADAR Editing in Viruses: An Evolutionary Force to Reckon with10/25/2021Adenosine Deaminases that Act on RNA (ADARs) are RNA editing enzymes that play a dynamic and nuanced role in regulating transcriptome and proteome diversity. This editing can be highly selective, affecting a specific site within a transcript, or nonselective, resulting in hyperediting. ADAR editing is important for regulating neural functions and autoimmunity, and has a key role in the innate immune response to viral infections, where editing can have a range of pro- or antiviral effects and can contribute to viral evolution. Here we examine the role of ADAR editing across a broad range of viral groups. We propose that the effect of ADAR editing on viral replication, whether pro- or antiviral, is better viewed as an axis rather than a binary, and that the specific position of a given virus on this axis is highly dependent on virus- and host-specific factors, and can change over the course of infection. However, more research needs to be devoted to understanding these dynamic factors and how they affect virus–ADAR interactions and viral evolution. Another area that warrants significant attention is the effect of virus–ADAR interactions on host–ADAR interactions, particularly in light of the crucial role of ADAR in regulating neural functions. Answering these questions will be essential to developing our understanding of the relationship between ADAR editing and viral infection. In turn, this will further our understanding of the effects of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, as well as many others, and thereby influence our approach to treating these deadly diseases. |
Agrarian Marxism, Animal Geographies, and non-human labor in Democratic Kampuchea09/2022Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) embarked on a genocidal program of sweeping economic, social, and political change. In an effort to modernize Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was renamed, CPK officials forced the entire populace to clear forests; build dams, canals, and reservoirs; and grow rice in an effort to accumulate rapidly the necessary capital for industrialization. In doing so, upwards of two million people died from disease, hunger and malnutrition, torture, and execution. The broad coordinates of the genocide are well-established. To date, however, no scholarship has examined critically the role of non-human animals in the agricultural transformations initiated during the Cambodian genocide. Drawing on two bodies of scholarship, Agrarian Marxism and Animal Geographies, in this paper we examine the role of draught animals in the regime's plans to build an economy around agricultural expansion and rice production for export. Specifically, we trace the new productive relationships into which Cambodia's water buffalo and oxen became enmeshed, and the structures of violence within which these animals played an essential part. We find not only that the work of draught animals materially contributed to the CPK's plans for state-building, but in the process, the new state–animal relationship became an exemplar of the idealized relationship between the CPK and its human laborers. We conclude that the human–animal relationship provides key insights into the mass violence that transpired in Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge and to this end encourage future engagement with interspecies relationships in the Cambodian context and in genocide studies more broadly. |
Airport Coronavirus Relief Grant Program (ACRGP) [Grant]2021Dates of grant: May 14, 2021 - May 13, 2025 Award amount: $13,000.00 Funder: Federal Aviation Administration Other Sponsored Activity: The Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriation Act (CRRSAA) (Public Law 116-260), signed into law on December 27, 2020, includes nearly $2 billion in funds to be awarded as economic relief to eligible U.S. airports and eligible concessions at those airports to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Principal Investigator: Constance Hawke Co-Principal Investigators: David Poluga |
Amid Physical Isolation, Creating Connections: Cross university project offers students opportunity to experience a new team collaboration2021The article explores Kent State University, like many universities, pivoted to remote, recorded productions. This new format was challenging and it failed to fulfill the expectations of realized design work for Kent State's scenic design graduate students. Early in the fall, we were counting the design opportunities, or lack thereof, in current productions. |
An Analysis of the Conceptual Structure of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Using Network Analysis and Visual Analytics05/04/2020Objective: This study analyzes the conceptual structure of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. We present a thematic mapping of concepts and a narrative exposition of the clusters of themes and relevant terminologies that explains the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has rattled the world in the past five months. We evaluate the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 and two previous coronavirus outbreaks, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. Finally, we point to areas for future epidemiological studies to help in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. |
An Automated System to Limit COVID-19 Using Facial Mask Detection in Smart City Network2020COVID-19 pandemic caused by novel coronavirus is continuously spreading until now all over the world. The impact of COVID-19 has been fallen on almost all sectors of development. The healthcare system is going through a crisis. Many precautionary measures have been taken to reduce the spread of this disease where wearing a mask is one of them. In this paper, we propose a system that restrict the growth of COVID-19 by finding out people who are not wearing any facial mask in a smart city network where all the public places are monitored with Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras. While a person without a mask is detected, the corresponding authority is informed through the city network. A deep learning architecture is trained on a dataset that consists of images of people with and without masks collected from various sources. The trained architecture achieved 98.7% accuracy on distinguishing people with and without a facial mask for previously unseen test data. It is hoped that our study would be a useful tool to reduce the spread of this communicable disease for many countries in the world. |
An Educational Intervention to Combat Whole Number Bias in Risk Perceptions in an Ambiguous Health Context: COVID-19 [Grant]2021Dates of grant: September 1, 2020 - August 31, 2021 Award amount: $172,372.27 Funder: U.S. Department of Education Research grant: The public receives daily updates about the number of people locally, nationally, and globally who are infected with, and die from, COVID-19. Whole number bias may cause people to disregard COVID-19 as a small threat and fail to heed preventative measures. The purpose of this study is to test whether a brief educational intervention diminishes whole number bias when reasoning about COVID-19 statistics. https://ies.ed.gov/funding/grantsearch/details.asp?ID=4518 Principal Investigator: Clarissa Thompson Co-Principal Investigators: Karin Coifman, Jennifer Taber |
An Educational Intervention to Combat Whole Number Bias in Risk Perceptions in an Ambiguous Health Context: COVID-19 [Grant]2021Dates of grant: September 1, 2021 - August 31, 2022 Award amount: $27,627.73 Funder: U.S. Department of Education Research grant: The public receives daily updates about the number of people locally, nationally, and globally who are infected with, and die from, COVID-19. Whole number bias may cause people to disregard COVID-19 as a small threat and fail to heed preventative measures. The purpose of this study is to test whether a brief educational intervention diminishes whole number bias when reasoning about COVID-19 statistics. https://ies.ed.gov/funding/grantsearch/details.asp?ID=4518 Principal Investigator: Clarissa Thompson Co-Principal Investigators: Karin Coifman, Jennifer Taber
|
An Empirical Infodemiology Study of What People Learned about COVID-19 and Behavior Towards Public Health Guidelines Using Web Searches09/2021Background: The use of the Internet and web-based platforms to obtain public health information and manage health-related issues has become widespread in this digital age. The practice is so pervasive that the first reaction to obtaining health information is to 'google it.' As SARS-CoV-2 broke out in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and quickly spread worldwide, people flocked to the Internet to learn about the novel coronavirus and the disease, COVID-19. Lagged response by governments and public health agencies to prioritize the Internet and the World Wide Web to disseminate information about the coronavirus outbreak and building trust gave room for others to quickly populate the social media, online blogs, news outlets, and websites with misinformation and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in people's deviant behaviors towards public health safety measures. Objective: To determine what people learned about the COVID-19 pandemic through "web search;" examine any association between what people learned about COVID-19 and behavior towards the public health guidelines; and analyze the impact of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic on people's behavior towards public health measures. Methods: This paper undertakes an infodemiology study using the Google trends worldwide search index covering the first six months after the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak (January 1st, to June 30th, 2020) when the public scrambled for information about the pandemic. Data analysis employed statistical trends, correlation and regression, principal component analysis, and predictive models. Results:(i). The principal components analysis identifies two latent variables comprising past coronavirus epidemics (pastCoVepidemics) and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (presCoVpandemic). Both principal components (PCs) were utilized significantly to learn about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 and explained 88.78% variability. (ii). Three (3) PCs fuelled misinformation about COVID-19 [Misinformation("Biological Weapon," "VirusHoax," "CommonCold," "COVID-19Hoax," "ChinaVirus"); ConspTheory1("@5G"); ConspTheory1("IngestBleach")]. These PCs explained 84.85% of the variability, (iii). Two (2) PCs identified two components of public health measures [PubHealthMes1("Social Distancing," "WashHand," "Isolation," "Quarantine."); PubHealthMes2("WearMask"), which explained 84.7% of the variability. (iv). Based on the PCA results, log-linear, and predictive models [ConspTheory1(@5G)] is identified as a predictor of people's behavior towards public health measures (PubHealthMes2). Although (r=0.83), (r=-0.11) for Misinformation(COVID-19Hoax, VirusHoax, CommonCold, and more) and ConspTheory2 (Ingestbleach), respectively, with PubHealthMes1(social dist, handwash, isolation, and more), both were not statistically significant with (p=0.267), (p=0.13), respectively. Conclusions: Several studies focus on the impacts of social media and related platforms on spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. This study provides the first empirical evidence to the mainly anecdotal discourse on the use of web search to learn about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. |
Anxiety and stress over COVID-19 pandemic associated with increased eating11/25/2021Objective Stressful experiences can dramatically affect eating. The relatively sudden, global emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic served as a massive stressor to virtually all people, regardless of infection status. This study hypothesized that actual and perceived stressors from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the categories of recurring disruptions, environmental threat, and social isolation would be positively associated with increased self-reported eating in the United States. Methods Over 1100 English-fluent adults (52.8% women) living in the United States were recruited for a cross-sectional online survey about eating, COVID-19 consequences, and stress experiences. Linear regressions examined associations between perceived stress on five eating measures, and individual differences in personal/work situations, perceptions, and adverse experiences during the pandemic. Results Anxiety, worry, and stress over, rather than direct consequences of, COVID-19 were most consistently associated with self-reported increased eating. Largely, these fell into the stressor categories of environmental threat and social isolation, not recurring disruptions. Body mass index and current self-reported eating pathology symptoms were also consistently associated with these outcomes. Conclusions These correlational findings suggest specific stressors have pronounced influences on eating behavior of US adults. Remotely deliverable stress mitigation strategies should be explored to attenuate increased eating. |