The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked unprecedented public health and social measures (PHSM) by national and local governments, including border restrictions, school closures, mandatory facemask use and stay at home orders. Quantifying the effectiveness of these interventions in reducing disease transmission is key to rational policy making in response to the current and future pandemics. In order to estimate the effectiveness of these interventions, detailed descriptions of their timelines, scale and scope are needed. The Health Intervention Tracking for COVID-19 (HIT-COVID) is a curated and standardized global database that catalogues the implementation and relaxation of COVID-19 related PHSM. With a team of over 200 volunteer contributors, we assembled policy timelines for a range of key PHSM aimed at reducing COVID-19 risk for the national and first administrative levels (e.g. provinces and states) globally, including details such as the degree of implementation and targeted populations. We continue to maintain and adapt this database to the changing COVID-19 landscape so it can serve as a resource for researchers and policymakers alike.

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Placement of foreign bodies within the urethra has intrigued urologists for years. We present the case of a 30-year-old man who had self-inserted 6 kidney beans into his urethra for sexual pleasure. Conservative attempts at removal with bedside interventions were unsuccessful. The patient required operative intervention with cystoscopy and urethral foreign body retrieval. No additional trauma was appreciated and all beans were extracted. Management of patients with a urethral foreign body can be attempted with bedside extraction, however proximal or challenging objects may require surgical extraction via either endoscopic or open approaches.

This paper considers the (n, k)-Bernoulli-Laplace model in the case when there are two urns, the total number of red and white balls is the same, and the number of selections k at each step is on the same asymptotic order as the number of balls n in each urn. Our main focus is on the large-time behavior of the corresponding Markov chain tracking the number of red balls in a given urn. Under reasonable assumptions on the asymptotic behavior of the ratio k/n as n → ∞, cutoff in the total variation distance is established. A cutoff window is also provided. These results, in particular, partially resolve an open problem posed by Eskenazis and Nestoridi in [8].

The emergence of COVID-19/SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) was an outbreak that began in December 2019 and rose to pandemic levels in 2020. One of the largest problems with COVID-19 is the typical delay in testing and diagnosis that can lead to additional transmission of the disease. Under consultation with a board-certified radiologist, the study team evaluated the common radiological findings of COVID-19 on computed tomography (CT) and compared the efficacy of chest radiographs (i.e., x-rays) to CT in diagnosing COVID-19. METHODS METHODS In 2020, the authors completed a retrospective review of radiologic imaging data (i.e., the original imaging report notes) from Italy performed on 47 patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 in Italy during the national outbreak from February to March 2020. Radiologic images were obtained from Società Italiana di Radiologia Medica e Interventistica radiological database of COVID-19 patients. Each case was analyzed for whether they had positive findings on either chest radiograph or CT or both among patients who had positive COVID-19 test results. RESULTS RESULTS The authors found significant radiological finding similarities among the 47 COVID-19 positive case studies from Italy during the February to March 2020 time period. Ground glass opacities and crazy paving were the most significant findings, resembling the findings in China and other Coronavirus strains. The authors' statistical analyses indicated that CT scans were more reliable by 30.7% than chest radiographs in identifying signs of COVID-19. In cases where either an initial negative swab for COVID-19 or providers lacked patient social histories, chest radiographs were used to show clinical findings consistent with COVID-19. CONCLUSIONS CONCLUSIONS Based on these results, chest radiographs appear to be a consistent method to assist in the diagnosis of most COVID-19 cases. The authors discuss several scenarios in community-based and non-hospital US settings for COVID-19 diagnostic processes.