An emphasis on active modes of transportation, that is, walking and cycling, has recently been renewed amid concerns for the environment and public health. However, the focus of research and practice that these modes have traditionally received is secondary to that received by motorized modes. As a consequence, the data on pedestrians (in particular, microscopic data) required for analysis and modeling are lacking. For instance, accurate data on the length of individual stride are not available in the transportation literature. This paper proposes a simple method to extract frequency and length of pedestrian stride automatically from video data collected nonintrusively in outdoor urban environments. The walking speed of a pedestrian oscillates during each stride; the oscillation can be identified through the frequency analysis of the speed signal. The method was validated with real-world data collected in Rouen, France, and Vancouver, Canada, where the root mean square errors for stride length were 6.1 and 5.7 cm, respectively. A method to distinguish pedestrians from motorized vehicles is proposed and used to analyze the 50 min of the Rouen data set to provide the distributions of stride frequency and length.

We report a series of 13 patients with COVID-19 treated with Cacipliq20®, an heparan sulfate mimetic approved for the treatment of hard to heal cutaneous ulcers. Heparan sulfates play important roles in tissue repair and possess antiviral activity. Cacipliq20® was administered through nebulization at a dose of 45 mg twice a day for 5.5 consecutive days. All patients presented respiratory symptoms with some dyspnea and in most cases pulmonary abnormalities on chest CT-Scan. Eight patients presented with a moderate form of the disease, three patients with a severe form, one with a mild form, and one with a critical form. In all patients the treatment was added to the standard of care. Ten patients were treated during the acute stage of the disease (<4 weeks from symptoms onset) while 3 patients were in the post-acute stage (>4 weeks from symptoms onset). A second treatment was administered for another 5.5 days in 6 patients. All patients showed clinically improvement after treatment. The time to first improvement ranged from 2 to 4 days after first treatment onset with a median of 3 days. Time to full clinical recovery ranged between 6 to 27 days from treatment onset with a median of 6 days. Lung CT scans followed clinical impression and showed a clear improvement of the lesions in most cases. The treatment was well tolerated in all patients. These preliminary observations should justify further evaluation through a well-designed placebo-controlled therapeutic trial.