The Electronic Medical Records of patients maintained needs to be ensured that privacy is preserved and must be accessible to authorized users such as doctors. Most of the health care systems use the traditional centralized database platforms for these data management; which is neither secure nor easy to maintain. These platforms can be replaced by distributed, efficient, and much more secure platforms which are backed by blockchain technology. In this work, a Decentralized application (dApp) is developed which allows users to upload and download medical data to and from the distributed file storage system. The application’s logic is written in solidity programming language in the smart contract. The application uses IPFS – Interplanetary File System, which is a distributed file storage system to store the medical records. Each file is broken down into pieces and each piece is given a hash which is stored on the blockchain. The user with right authentication has the privilege to access these hashes on the blockchain helping them in downloading the desired file. The application is tested through different nodes on the network which successfully resulted in securely storing and downloading the files from the distributed network. The results envision that the data stored in the IPFS is immutable, distributed across its network which makes it impossible for anyone to just access it. The dApp developed is tested with two performance metrics i.e. the number of transactions per unit time and the time taken to search records in the blockchain network and also the scalability issue pertaining to blockchain is also discussed.

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After the devastating second wave of COVID-19, with the rapid increase in the number of new cases in many states of India marking the beginning of a probable third wave of COVID-19, our best bet is taking a jab to protect against COVID-19. Currently, licensed vaccines are found to be reasonably safe and effective. The second wave of COVID-19 was devastating, but it's a silver lining to note that most of the individuals who had taken the jab recovered with mild infections, and the hospitalization rates among jabbed individuals were meager.  Various rumours related to the efficacy, safety, content, and side effects of the vaccine in India had caused a plunge in the vaccine acceptance rate leading to hesitancy and carelessness among the Indian population. This is a critical time for facts, not fear or rumors. This review provides an insight into the myths, pros and cons, and efficacy of the available vaccines.

This chapter provides insight on pattern recognition by illustrating various approaches and frameworks which aid in the prognostic reasoning facilitated by feature selection and feature extraction. The chapter focuses on analyzing syntactical and statistical approaches of pattern recognition. Typically, a large set of features have an impact on the performance of the predictive model. Hence, there is a need to eliminate redundant and noisy pieces of data before developing any predictive model. The selection of features is independent of any machine learning algorithms. The content-rich information obtained after the elimination of noisy patterns such as stop words and missing values is then used for further prediction. The refinement and extraction of relevant features yields in performance enhancements of future prediction and analysis.

The elderly are more prone to mortality from COVID-19 infection, as they are susceptible to develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). For COVID-19 patients with ARDS caused by sepsis or septic shock, high-dose parenteral vitamin B12 appears to be a potential new treatment option. Vitamin B12 may play a substantial impact in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality reduction owing to its function in DNA synthesis, cellular control, improvement of anti-inflammatory immune responses, and decrease of pro-inflammatory responses. This review aims to assess the functional role of Vitamin B12 in COVID-19 in terms of its immunomodulatory effect, role in cellular and humoral immunity and maintaining the gut microbe homeostasis. From data inception to June 2021, accessible electronic databases were searched for research/review articles reporting on the function of Vitamin B12 in COVID-19. Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, WHO worldwide research on COVID-19 and the clinical trials registration “https://clinicaltrials.gov/” were used to conduct the systematic search by using keywords: “COVID-19 and “Vitamin B12”. Also, based on these outcomes, it can be concluded that Vitamin B12 may have a potential role in preventing COVID-19 complications. Further, studies evaluating the role of Vitamin B12 in COVID-19 may open a new array of ideas on the optimal and the well-tolerated dose and timing of its administration in COVID-19 patients.