Rice Coronavirus Research
Works related to coronaviruses that are authored by members of the Rice community.
Recent Submissions
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Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-induced Encephalopathy and Encephalitis in COVID-19 Cases
(2023)The SARS-CoV-2 virus caused an unprecedented pandemic around the globe, infecting 36.5 million people and causing the death of over 1 million in the United States of America alone. COVID-19 patients demonstrated respiratory symptoms, cardiovascular complications, and neurologic symptoms, which in most severe cases included encephalopathy and encephalitis. ... -
Balancing economic and epidemiological interventions in the early stages of pathogen emergence
(2023)The global pandemic of COVID-19 has underlined the need for more coordinated responses to emergent pathogens. These responses need to balance epidemic control in ways that concomitantly minimize hospitalizations and economic damages. We develop a hybrid economic-epidemiological modeling framework that allows us to examine the interaction between ... -
Enabling accurate and early detection of recently emerged SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in wastewater
(2023)As clinical testing declines, wastewater monitoring can provide crucial surveillance on the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variant of concerns (VoCs) in communities. In this paper we present QuaID, a novel bioinformatics tool for VoC detection based on quasi-unique mutations. The benefits of QuaID are three-fold: (i) provides up to 3-week earlier VoC ... -
SARS-CoV-2 Exposure in Norway Rats (Rattus norvegicus) from New York City
(2023)Millions of Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) inhabit New York City (NYC), presenting the potential for transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) from humans to rats. We evaluated SARS-CoV-2 exposure among 79 rats captured from NYC during the fall of 2021. Our results showed that 13 of the 79 rats (16.5%) tested IgG- ... -
Aging and Burnout for Nurses in an Acute Care Setting: The First Wave of COVID-19
(2023)We examined the relationship between age, coping, and burnout during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic with nurses in Texas (N = 376). Nurses were recruited through a professional association and snowball sampling methodology for the cross-sectional survey study. Framed in lifespan development theories, we expected that nurse age and experience would ... -
The contagion number: How fast can a disease spread?
(2023)The burning number of a graph models the rate at which a disease, information, or other externality can propagate across a network. The burning number is known to be NP-hard even for a tree. Herein, we define a relative of the burning number that we coin the contagion number (CN). We aver that the CN is a better metric to model disease spread than ... -
The COVID-19 Challenge Now Is Getting Into Heads, Arms Will Follow
(2021)With the onset and rapid spread of COVID-19 without a safe and effective vaccine, initial efforts to reduce community spread focused on basic public health measures such as mask wearing, social distancing, handwashing, avoiding large gatherings, and suspected cases isolation and quarantine. Following was the development of the COVID-19 vaccination ... -
Modeling the positive testing rate of COVID-19 in South Africa using a semi-parametric smoother for binomial data
(2023)Identification and isolation of COVID-19 infected persons plays a significant role in the control of COVID-19 pandemic. A country's COVID-19 positive testing rate is useful in understanding and monitoring the disease transmission and spread for the planning of intervention policy. Using publicly available data collected between March 5th, 2020 and ... -
Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza in preK-12 schools shows school, community, and citywide infections
(2023)Wastewater surveillance is a passive and efficient way to monitor the spread of infectious diseases in large populations and high transmission areas such as preK-12 schools. Infections caused by respiratory viruses in school-aged children are likely underreported, particularly because many children may be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic. Wastewater ... -
Analysis of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid metatranscriptomes among patients with COVID-19 disease
(2022)To better understand the potential relationship between COVID-19 disease and hologenome microbial community dynamics and functional profiles, we conducted a multivariate taxonomic and functional microbiome comparison of publicly available human bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) metatranscriptome samples amongst COVID-19 (n = 32), community acquired ... -
Physical Activity Independently Predicts Perceived Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Private University Students
(2022)Physical activity has significantly declined during the COVID-19 pandemic. Declines in physical activity have correlated with increased levels of perceived stress, though studies examining physical activity and stress have failed to account for critical confounds. The present study aims to determine whether physical activity independently predicts ... -
Insights From the Virtual Team Science: Rapid Deployment During COVID-19
(2022)Objective: To provide insights for organizations that must rapidly deploy teams to remote work. Background: Modern situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, are rapidly accelerating the need for organizations to move employee teams to virtual environments, sometimes with little to no opportunities to prepare for the transition. It is likely that ... -
Genomic Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Alpha, Beta and Delta Variants of Concern Uncovers Signatures of Neutral and Non-Neutral Evolution
(2022)Due to the emergence of new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the question of how the viral genomes evolved, leading to the formation of highly infectious strains, becomes particularly important. Three major emergent strains, Alpha, Beta and Delta, characterized by a significant number of missense mutations, provide a natural test field. We ... -
Vaccination for COVID-19 among historically underserved Latino communities in the United States: Perspectives of community health workers
(2022)A critical step to reduce the spread of COVID-19 is vaccination. We conducted a mixed methods project that used online surveys and focus groups with 64 Community Health Workers and Promotor/as (CHW/Ps) located near the U.S.-Mexico border to identify barriers and facilitators to COVID-19 vaccination among Latino communities that have been historically ... -
Stay-at-home and face mask policy intentions inconsistent with incidence and fatality during the US COVID-19 pandemic
(2022)During the COVID-19 pandemic, many states imposed stay-at-home (SAH) and mandatory face mask (MFM) orders to supplement the United States CDC recommendations. The purpose of this study was to characterize the relationship between SAH and MFM approaches with the incidence and fatality of COVID-19 during the pandemic period until 23 August 2020 (about ... -
Living Situation and Physical Activity in the COVID-19 Pandemic Among American Private University Students
(2022)Many university students experienced changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, including potential changes in physical activity (PA) levels and living situation. As PA behaviors in young adulthood help establish life-long habits and future health outcomes, the purpose of this study was to investigate overall change in PA, as well as change in PA due to ... -
Blocked by Gender: Disparities in COVID19 infection detection in Tamil Nadu, India
(2022)Globally, a gender gap in COVID-19 has been noted with men reporting higher share of both morbidity and deaths compared to women. While the gender gap in fatalities has been similar across the globe, there have been interesting disparities in the detection of COVID-19 cases in men and women. While wealthier, more developed nations have generally seen ... -
Creation of a Global Vaccine Risk Index
(2022)The World Health Organization has identified vaccine hesitancy as one of its top ten global health threats for 2019. Efforts are underway to define the factors responsible for reductions in vaccine confidence. However, as global measles cases accelerated beginning in 2018, it became evident that additional factors were promoting measles re-emergence, ... -
Infectious Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Exhaled Aerosols and Efficacy of Masks During Early Mild Infection
(2022)Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) epidemiology implicates airborne transmission; aerosol infectiousness and impacts of masks and variants on aerosol shedding are not well understood.We recruited coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases to give blood, saliva, mid-turbinate and fomite (phone) swabs, and 30-minute breath ... -
Advancing methods for wastewater disease surveillance of antibiotic resistance and SARS-CoV-2
(2022-09-19)Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), which involves using biological indicators in sewage to provide information on the overall health of a community, is a powerful tool to monitor public health. WBE offers several advantages that make it complementary to conventional clinical surveillance: it is rapid and resource-efficient, enables broad monitoring ...
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