The COVID-19 pandemic has had growing environmental consequences related to plastic use and follow-up waste, but more urgent health issues have far overshadowed the potential impacts. This paper ...gives a prospective outlook on how the disruption caused by COVID-19 can act as a catalyst for short-term and long-term changes in plastic waste management practices throughout the world. The impact of the pandemic and epidemic following through the life cycles of various plastic products, particularly those needed for personal protection and healthcare, is assessed. The energy and environmental footprints of these product systems have increased rapidly in response to the surge in the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide, while critical hazardous waste management issues are emerging due to the need to ensure destruction of residual pathogens in household and medical waste. The concept of Plastic Waste Footprint (PWF) is proposed to capture the environmental footprint of a plastic product throughout its entire life cycle. Emerging challenges in waste management during and after the pandemic are discussed from the perspective of novel research and environmental policies. The sudden shift in waste composition and quantity highlights the need for a dynamically reponsive waste management system. Six future research directions are suggested to mitigate the potential impacts of the pandemic on waste management systems.
•Expert insight for dealing with COVID-19 plastic use and waste.•Minimising plastic waste during and after the pandemic.•Introduction and benefits of Plastic Waste Footprint.•Considering and reducing Environmental, including GHG, Footprints.
This study examines the relationship between international tourism and COVID-19 cases and associated deaths in more than 90 nations. We use a cross-country regression analysis and find a positive ...correlation between international tourism and the cumulated level of COVID-19 confirmed cases and death by April 30, 2020. Our regression analyses show that countries exposed to high flows of international tourism are more prone to cases and deaths caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. This association is robust even after controlling for other socioeconomic determinants of COVID-19 outbreak and regional dummies. Based on our estimations, a 1% higher level of inbound and outbound tourism is associated with 1.2% and 1.4% higher levels of confirmed COVID-19 cases and death, respectively, controlling for other factors. When we normalize the number of cases and death by size of population, the statistical significance remains robust, especially for the COVID-19 deaths, while the effect size reduces.
This qualitative research aims to determine changes in students’ learning behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact of changes on students’ learning behaviour at SMA Kristen Kapan. The ...research subjects were students, teachers, and the headmaster. The data were collected through observation, interviews, and documentation. The data were analysed through data reduction, data display, and drawing conclusions. The study shows that there are changes in students' learning behaviour, namely: the students were less active to ask questions, the students were less enthusiastic about learning, and the students were not active (silent) in joining the learning process. Besides, the impact is that the students begin to forget the school culture, students were more interested in playing online games and social media, lack discipline in learning, the students feel bored, and lack motivation.
As a threat, a pandemic has indirect implications for social, economic and political conditions both at domestic and international levels. Thus, collective and comprehensive efforts are needed in ...responding to and preventing the expansion of infections caused by the virus, including Covid-19. This international conference provides the discourse on social, economic as well as political issues regarding the condition after the pandemic. Social issues are studied through social welfare, sociology, governance, communication and international relations approaches. Meanwhile, economic problems are discussed through business, economic development and economic management approaches. Under the First International Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences (ICHSOS) 2021, speakers from several countries provided solutions and alternative perspectives in preventing and dealing with problems after the Covid-19 pandemic. This book contains 42 papers presented at the conference.
Many policies were put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States to manage the negative impact of the coronavirus. Limiting severe illness and death was one important objective of ...these policies, but it is widely acknowledged by public health ethicists that pandemic policies needed to consider other factors. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 people across 17 states who participated in the state-level COVID-19 pandemic policy process, we examine how those actors recounted their engagement with four different objectives over the course of the pandemic: protecting public health with respect to COVID-19 (which we refer to as pathogen-focused disease prevention), protecting the economy, promoting the public's broader health and wellbeing, and preserving and restoring individual freedoms. We describe the different ways that pathogen-focused disease prevention was thought to have conflicted with, or to have been coherent with, the other three policy objectives over the course of the pandemic. In tracing the shifting relationships between objectives, we highlight four reasons put forward by the participants for why policy changes occurred throughout the pandemic: a change on the part of decisionmaker(s) regarding the perceived acceptability of the negative effects of a policy on one or more policy objectives; a change in the epistemic context; a change in the ‘tools in the toolbox’; and a change in the public's attitudes that affected the feasibility of a policy. We conclude by considering the ethical implications of the shifting relationships that were described between objectives over the course of the pandemic.
•Pandemic policymaking had many objectives that differently aligned and conflicted.•Changes in policymakers' priorities and contextual factors influenced policy changes.•Pandemic policymakers should be prepared for needs to change.
The COVID-19 pandemic provoked a large impact on tourism because of the enforcement of harsh travel restrictions and the increased global health risks caused by international mobility. This paper ...utilizes a longitudinal analysis to tests the impact of COVID-19 on tourists’ health risk perceptions, and their relationships with destination image perception and visiting intentions. Tourists are surveyed at two different points of time, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Multi-group structural equation modeling is utilized for the comparison of the relationships at the two points of time. The results show that the negative influence of health risk perceptions on destination image perception and visiting intentions are significantly larger after the COVID-19 pandemic while there are no significant differences in the impact of destination image perception on visiting intentions. Thus, not only are tourists more sensitive to health risk perceptions after COVID-19, but this higher sensitivity has larger impacts both on their perceptions of destination image and on the behavioural implication. The results have useful implications in terms of the need to dedicate more efforts for the management of health conditions of destinations after COVID-19.
•Presents a framework for conceptualizing and assessing health risk perceptions in tourism destinations in two scenarios, pre and post-pandemic.•Longitudinal appraisal of the impact of the pandemic on health risk perceptions.•Quantitatively testing the effects of the pandemic on health risk perception and health-related behavior.
The global epistemological gendarmerie do not only police epistemologies but they also infect the world with infectious epidemics of laughter targeted at those people whose epistemologies are ...offhandedly condemned as sterile and useless in controlling and containing pandemics. Patrolling epistemic borders in ways that demobilise indigenous epistemologies, the global epistemological policemen have ironically managed to prevent transgressive epistemologies from crossing borders but they have fatally failed to prevent the transgressive COVID-19 from recurrently crossing borders, be they bodily, national or continental. Brandishing fetishised degree and diploma certificates, African comprador academics, who are more interested in fetishised ranks and titles than in creativity and innovation, have also fatally failed to help African communities by producing vaccines for Africans by Africans. Arguing that Eurocentric epistemologies have become sterile fetishes, the book contends that such epistemologies have disabled African scholars from actively producing vaccines on a continent where there are paradoxically more epidemics of mimetic laughter than there are efforts at creativity and innovation. The book is useful for scholars in sociology, anthropology, development studies, languages and communication, natural sciences, historical studies and social work.
Background: Infertility remains an important problem with a significant negative social impact on infertile couples. intrauterine insemination (IUI) is an assisted method of infertility treatment in ...couples with unexplained and mild/moderate male factor subfertility. In the present study, we compared infertility-related stress in women undergoing the IUI cycle before and after COVID-19 Pandemic. Materials and Methods: One hundred and sixty women undergoing the IUI cycle participated in the present study. Samples were collected from Jun 2019 to December 2019 and postponed for 6 months because of COVID-19 Pandemic. Afterward, sampling was started again in March 2021. The sampling was divided into two parts, including (I) before and (II) after COVID-19 Pandemic. A socio-demographic form and Fertility Problem Inventory (FPI) questionnaire were completed by participants before starting their treatment. Statistical analyses were performed using Prism software. Results: According to the results of FPI questionnaires, ~95% of all women participating in the study showed medium to very high levels of total infertility stress. The mean total scores of FPI in patients before and after the COVID-19 Pandemic groups were 137.6 ± 24.8 and 134.6 ± 27, respectively. The comparison of FPI scores between the two groups exhibited no significant difference (P˃0.05). Findings also showed that total infertility stress was significantly associated with age, duration of infertility, employment, and educational status. No significant relationship was found between total infertility stress and other data (cause of infertility, type of infertility, and history of previous IUI). Conclusion: According to our study, COVID-19 Pandemic did not affect infertility-related stress in infertile women.
PDF
