Psychological Distress of International Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic in China: Multidimensional Effects of External Environment, Individuals’ Behavior, and Their Values

Xu, Tao

doi:10.3390/ijerph18189758

Cited by 19 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Several other factors may have led to Africans in China having higher levels such as limited access to public resources due to informational, language, financial, and cultural barriers in China, loneliness, helplessness, lack of social support, inability to visit families, fear of not graduating on time, fear of economic collapse, and future job uncertainties. Another study also supported this finding stating that international students are one of the most affected groups and are easily neglected in pandemics especially if their home countries are also in a crisis [ 58 , 59 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

The psychological impact of COVID-19 on university students in China and Africa

Marahwa

Makota²,

Chikomo³

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

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The COVID-19 pandemic is alarmingly a global health catastrophe that has created an unprecedented mental health decline especially in young adults, who have been noted to be a vulnerable population. In this study, we investigated the prevalence of depression and anxiety in university students in China and Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic, the significant factors contributing to the prevalence of anxiety and depression, the differences in factors affecting the different groups being investigated and to emphasize that psychological intervention are as important as the physical interventions during and after the pandemic. The study was conducted through online surveys, with 684 participants using Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 standardized scales. Comparing all groups combined, of the 636 participants, 361 (56.8%) had depression and 227 (35.7%) had anxiety. Chi squared tests at significance level (P<0.05) showed that country of citizenship, religion, parents’ educational background, household monthly income and, having family members with COVID-19 variables were strongly associated with depression and anxiety. In contrast, age, gender, educational background, and major showed no significant association. Comparing the individual groups separately using chi square (P<0.05), the Chinese students in China group had 35.6% with depression and 13.1% with anxiety. The variable associated with both depression and anxiety was education major, with depression only was parent’s educational background and with anxiety only was gender. The African students in China group had 70.3% with depression and 45.0% with anxiety. Gender was strongly associated with both depression and anxiety, and religion and having family members with COVID-19 with anxiety only. Africans in Africa had 66.0% with depression and 50.5% with anxiety. Educational background was strongly associated with depression. There was no statistically significant variable for anxiety. Chi square test showed a statistically significant difference in depression and anxiety levels with the Chinese group compared to both African groups, and no significant difference between both African groups. Our findings demonstrated that COVID-19 had a negative psychological impact on university students. Therefore, more attention should be put on youth’s mental health during this pandemic.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

The psychological impact of COVID-19 on university students in China and Africa

Marahwa

Makota²,

Chikomo³

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

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“…As of June 2021, there have been 173 million COVID-19 cases worldwide, with new cases rapidly increasing at an alarming rate and showing no signs of abating [1]. If COVID-19 infection is not detected early enough, it can induce a flu-like sickness that can proceed to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which can be deadly [2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Due to limited resources and the amount of data accessible to the scientific community, early diagnosis of COVID-19 remains a tough challenge despite recent worldwide research efforts in healthcare [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-Transformer: Interpretable COVID-19 Detection Using Vision Transformer for Healthcare

Shome

Kar

Mohanty³

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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In the recent pandemic, accurate and rapid testing of patients remained a critical task in the diagnosis and control of COVID-19 disease spread in the healthcare industry. Because of the sudden increase in cases, most countries have faced scarcity and a low rate of testing. Chest X-rays have been shown in the literature to be a potential source of testing for COVID-19 patients, but manually checking X-ray reports is time-consuming and error-prone. Considering these limitations and the advancements in data science, we proposed a Vision Transformer-based deep learning pipeline for COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray-based imaging. Due to the lack of large data sets, we collected data from three open-source data sets of chest X-ray images and aggregated them to form a 30 K image data set, which is the largest publicly available collection of chest X-ray images in this domain to our knowledge. Our proposed transformer model effectively differentiates COVID-19 from normal chest X-rays with an accuracy of 98% along with an AUC score of 99% in the binary classification task. It distinguishes COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia patient’s X-rays with an accuracy of 92% and AUC score of 98% in the Multi-class classification task. For evaluation on our data set, we fine-tuned some of the widely used models in literature, namely, EfficientNetB0, InceptionV3, Resnet50, MobileNetV3, Xception, and DenseNet-121, as baselines. Our proposed transformer model outperformed them in terms of all metrics. In addition, a Grad-CAM based visualization is created which makes our approach interpretable by radiologists and can be used to monitor the progression of the disease in the affected lungs, assisting healthcare.

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“…In this Special Issue, entitled “Mental health in the time of COVID-19”, several studies, carried out in different parts of the world, such as China [ 66 ], Canada [ 67 ], the UK [ 68 ], Greece [ 69 ], Poland [ 70 ], Norway [ 71 ], India [ 72 ], Mexico [ 73 ], Malaysia [ 74 ], Kenya [ 75 ], Saudi Arabia [ 76 ], and Switzerland [ 77 ], describe the impact of the pandemic on different dimensions of people’s mental health.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%