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In this work, the COVID-19 pandemic burden in Ukraine is investigated retrospectively using the excess mortality measures during 2020–2021. In particular, the epidemic impact on the Ukrainian population is studied via the standardized both all-cause and cause-specific mortality scores before and during the epidemic. The excess mortality counts during the pandemic were predicted based on historic data using parametric and nonparametric modeling and then compared with the actual reported counts to quantify the excess. The corresponding standardized mortalityP-score metrics were also compared with the neighboring countries. In summary, there were three “waves” of excess all-cause mortality in Ukraine in December 2020, April 2021 and November 2021 with excess of 32%, 43% and 83% above the expected mortality. Each new “wave” of the all-cause mortality was higher than the previous one and the mortality “peaks” corresponded in time to three “waves” of lab-confirmed COVID-19 mortality. The lab-confirmed COVID-19 mortality constituted 9% to 24% of the all-cause mortality during those three peak months. Overall, the mortality trends in Ukraine over time were similar to neighboring countries where vaccination coverage was similar to that in Ukraine. For cause-specific mortality, the excess observed was due to pneumonia as well as circulatory system disease categories that peaked at the same times as the all-cause and lab-confirmed COVID-19 mortality, which was expected. The pneumonias as well as circulatory system disease categories constituted the majority of all cases during those peak times. The seasonality in mortality due to the infectious and parasitic disease category became less pronounced during the pandemic. While the reported numbers were always relatively low, alcohol-related mortality also declined during the pandemic.

 

In the early 2000s, our primarily undergraduate, white institution (PUI/PWI), began recruiting and enrolling higher numbers of students of color and first-generation college students. However, like many of our peer institutions, our established pedagogies and mindsets did not provide these students an educational experience to enable them to persist and thrive in STEM. Realizing the need to systematically address our lack of inclusivity in science majors, in 2012 faculty from multiple disciplines developed the Science, Math, and Research Training (SMART) program. Here, we describe an educational innovation, originally funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, designed to support and retain students of color, first generation college students, and other students with marginalized identities in the sciences through a cohort-based, integrated, and inclusive first-year experience focused on community and sense of belonging. The SMART program engages first-year students with semester-long themed courses around “real world” problems of antibiotic resistance and viral infections while integrating the fields of Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and an optional Computer Science component. In the decade since its inception, 97% of SMART students have graduated or are on track to graduate, with 80.9% of these students earning a major in a STEM discipline. Here, we present additional student outcomes since the initiation of this program, results of the student self-evaluative surveys SALG and CURE, and lessons we have learned from a decade of this educational experience. 

IoT devices can be used to complete a wide array of physical tasks, but due to factors such as low computational resources and distributed physical deployment, they are susceptible to a wide array of faulty behaviors. Many devices deployed in homes, vehicles, industrial sites, and hospitals carry a great risk of damage to property, harm to a person, or breach of security if they behave faultily. We propose a general fault handling system named IoTRepair, which shows promising results for effectiveness with limited latency and power overhead in an IoT environment. IoTRepair dynamically organizes and customizes fault-handling techniques to address the unique problems associated with heterogeneous IoT deployments. We evaluate IoTRepair by creating a physical implementation mirroring a typical home environment to motivate the effectiveness of this system. Our evaluation showed that each of our fault-handling functions could be completed within 100 milliseconds after fault identification, which is a fraction of the time that state-of-the-art fault-identification methods take (measured in minutes). The power overhead is equally small, with the computation and device action consuming less than 30 milliwatts. This evaluation shows that IoTRepair not only can be deployed in a physical system, but offers significant benefits at a low overhead. 

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) variants of concern (VOC) has raised questions regarding vaccine protection against SARS‐CoV‐2 infection, transmission, and ongoing virus evolution. Twenty‐three mildly symptomatic “vaccination breakthrough” infections were identified as early as January 2021 in Alachua County, Florida, among individuals fully vaccinated with either the BNT162b2 (Pfizer) or the Ad26 (Janssen/J&J) vaccines. SARS‐CoV‐2 genomes were successfully generated for 11 of the vaccine breakthroughs, and 878 individuals in the surrounding area and were included for reference‐based phylogenetic investigation. These 11 individuals were characterized by infection with VOCs, but also low‐frequency variants present within the surrounding population. Low‐frequency mutations were observed, which have been more recently identified as mutations of interest owing to their location within targeted immune epitopes (P812L) and association with increased replicative capacity (L18F). We present these results to posit the nature of the efficacy of vaccines in reducing symptoms as both a blessing and a curse—as vaccination becomes more widespread and self‐motivated testing reduced owing to the absence of severe symptoms, we face the challenge of early recognition of novel mutations of potential concern. This case study highlights the critical need for continued testing and monitoring of infection and transmission among individuals regardless of vaccination status.