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As of December 2020, COVID-19 has spread all over the world with more than 81 million cases and more than 1.8 million deaths. The rapidly increasing number of patients mandates the consideration of potential treatments for patients under severe and critical conditions. Convalescent plasma (CP) treatment refers to the approach of infusing patients with plasma from recently recovered patients. CP appears to be a possible therapeutic option to manage patients suffering from severe or even lethal infectious disorders, in which “traditional therapies” have failed to obtain any result. In the present study, we develop a mathematical model on the treatment-donation-stockpile dynamics for an optimal implementation of CP therapy to examine potential benefits and complications in the logistic realization of this therapy in a large-scale population. We parameterize the model with COVID-19 epidemics in Italy, and conduct scenario analyses to estimate outcomes of population-wide CP therapy and to examine the maximum number of CP donation processions per day. Under the assumption that the efficacy of CP is 90%, we show that by the end of year 2020, initiating the population-wide CP therapy from April 2020 can save as many as 19,215 lives (ranging from 5000 - 28,000 depending on donor availability), while the demand for apheresis use is manageable in all scenarios: the maximum daily demand is 156 (ranging from 27 - 519 depending on donor availability) for the first outbreak wave and 1,434 (ranging from 224 - 4,817 depending on donor availability) for the second wave. Given that Italy has 61 centers with apheresis this maximum demand level corresponds to a daily average of 2.5 and 23.5 processions of CP donation being performed by each center with respect to each outbreak wave. Our analyses show that population-wide CP therapy can contribute to curbing COVID-19 related deaths, and the logistic implementation is feasible for developed countries. The reduction of deaths can be very significant if the CP therapy is started earlier at the outbreak, and remains significant even if it is implemented during the outbreak peak time.

This dataset provides access to the metadata records of publications, research data, software and projects that may be relevant to the Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) fight. The dataset contains the OpenAIRE COVID-19 Gateway records, identified via full-text mining and inference techniques applied to the OpenAIRE Graph. The OpenAIRE Graph is one of the largest Open Access collections of metadata records and links between publications, datasets, software, projects, funders, and organizations, aggregating 12,000+ scientific data sources world-wide, among which the Covid-19 data sources Zenodo COVID-19 Community, WHO (World Health Organization), BIP! FInder for COVID-19, Protein Data Bank, Dimensions, scienceOpen, and RSNA. The dataset consists of a tar archive containing gzip files with one json per line. Each json is compliant to the schema available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8238913.

In the course of our PubMed searches and preprints from MedRxiv, we identified a number of protocols for RCTs on preventive measures and treatments for Covid-19. This file is updated regularly.

Database COVID

This is a summary report of the series of workshops on FAIR research information in open infrastructures that was jointly organised by the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine (SSTL) and Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) which have been collaborating under the framework of Joint German-Ukrainian project supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany and the Ministry of Science and Education of Ukraine. The workshops successfully harnessed the enthusiasm and experience of librarians, researchers, software providers, public funding body representatives, content providers, scientometricians and information specialists in an attempt to shed light and define criteria which assist discovery and reuse of research information by third-parties and make it FAIR. The series of workshops consisted of four separate workshops which addressed single aspects of FAIR– findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse concerning research information. Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions workshops were held online between September 2020 and January 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a great challenge, especially for families. We aimed to analyze the impact of the pandemic on childcare for and the work–family balance of pediatric surgeons in Germany. An anonymized questionnaire on the working and familial situation before and during the COVID-19 pandemic was sent to the members of the German Society of Pediatric Surgery and trainees in pediatric surgery (April–July 2021). One-hundred-fifty-three participants (59% female) completed the questionnaire. A total of 16% of the males and 62% of the females worked part-time. Most (68%) had underage children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 36% reported a decrease in patients and interventions, and 55% reported an increase in the organizational workrelated burden. Childcare for underage children during lockdown was organized mainly with the help of institutional emergency childcare (45%), staying home (34%), one parent working from a home office (33%), or staying home by themselves (34%). Before the lockdown, 54% reported a good work–family balance. During the lockdown, this worsened by 42%. Most of the families had to organize themselves. Different means such as a home office, flexible working hours, and different models for childcare can help to improve the situation.

The perspective of procurement and supply chain management is changing dramatically; traditionally, it was seen as a support function; however, the procurement function is receiving increased attention and investment as an essential contributor to the strategic success and a business enabler. While an end-to-end digital supply chain is an opportunity as it unleashes the next level of strategic growth and involves minimal investment in infrastructure, it is still a challenge to optimize and transform. Furthermore, the recent pandemics and geopolitical disruptions of Covid-19, the Ukraine-Russian war, Brexit and the US-China trade war; have structurally changed the global economy and revealed a new risk assessment that will result in the re-introduction of buffers, boundaries across industries and a partial return to regionalization with sort of de-globalization in which existing just-in-time getting replaced by just-in-case strategy.

COVID-19 is spreading at a rate that could cause fear for international trade. In the past three months, the total number of confirmed cases has increased. The virus has confined more than half of the planet, contaminating the functioning of industries, dysfunctioning infrastructure at the national level, such as health care, transport, commerce and public services. The slowdown in production in China has had effects worldwide, reflecting China's growing importance in global supply chains and in commodity markets. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where foreign trade represents on average 60% of its economy, is severely affected by this pandemic. The economy is in recession, prices continue to climb, the value of the currency continues to depreciate and leads to a loss of confidence.