Roy Horn, famed tiger handler and co-star of the magic duo known as Siegfried and Roy, died of complications from the coronavirus in a hospital in Las Vegas on Friday. He was 75 years old. "Today, the world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend," Siegfried Fischbacher said in a statement. "From the moment we met, I knew Roy and I, together, would change the world." "There could be no Siegfried without Roy, and no Roy without Siegfried." This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

With the coronavirus pandemic, many folks switched to working online. Things like teaching, business meetings and other face-to-face activities have been replaced with video calls. Home has become both home and workplace, and admit it: your wardrobe totally reflects this. Creative duo The Workmans shows this “fashion crossover” in their latest photo series #COVIDwear. The […]

The post #COVIDwear: a hilarious photo series showing quarantine fashion of remote workers appeared first on DIY Photography.

A reaction-diffusion model was developed describing the spread of the COVID-19 virus considering the mean daily movement of susceptible, exposed and asymptomatic individuals. The model was calibrated using data on the confirmed infection and death from France as well as their initial spatial distribution. First, the system of partial differential equations is studied, then the basic reproduction number, R0 is derived. Second, numerical simulations, based on a combination of level-set and finite differences, shown the spatial spread of COVID-19 from March 16 to June 16. Finally, scenarios of unlockdown are compared according to variation of distancing, or partially spatial lockdown.

In response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, there is an ever-increasing number of national governments that are rolling out contact-tracing Apps to aid the containment of the virus. The first hugely contentious issue facing the Apps is the deployment framework, i.e. centralised or decentralised. Based on this, the debate branches out to the corresponding technologies that underpin these architectures, i.e. GPS, QR codes, and Bluetooth. This work conducts a pioneering review of the above scenarios and contributes a geolocation mapping of the current deployment. The vulnerabilities and the directions of research are identified, with a special focus on the Bluetooth-based decentralised scheme.

We show that combining a prediction model (based on neural networks), with a new method of test pooling (better than the original Dorfman method, and better than double-pooling) called 'Grid', we can reduce the number of Covid-19 tests by 73%.

With the rapidly worldwide spread of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), it is of great importance to conduct early diagnosis of COVID-19 and predict the time that patients might convert to the severe stage, for designing effective treatment plan and reducing the clinicians' workloads. In this study, we propose a joint classification and regression method to determine whether the patient would develop severe symptoms in the later time, and if yes, predict the possible conversion time that the patient would spend to convert to the severe stage. To do this, the proposed method takes into account 1) the weight for each sample to reduce the outliers' influence and explore the problem of imbalance classification, and 2) the weight for each feature via a sparsity regularization term to remove the redundant features of high-dimensional data and learn the shared information across the classification task and the regression task. To our knowledge, this study is the first work to predict the disease progression and the conversion time, which could help clinicians to deal with the potential severe cases in time or even save the patients' lives. Experimental analysis was conducted on a real data set from two hospitals with 422 chest computed tomography (CT) scans, where 52 cases were converted to severe on average 5.64 days and 34 cases were severe at admission. Results show that our method achieves the best classification (e.g., 85.91% of accuracy) and regression (e.g., 0.462 of the correlation coefficient) performance, compared to all comparison methods. Moreover, our proposed method yields 76.97% of accuracy for predicting the severe cases, 0.524 of the correlation coefficient, and 0.55 days difference for the converted time.

Chest computed tomography (CT) becomes an effective tool to assist the diagnosis of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide, using the computed-aided diagnosis technique for COVID-19 classification based on CT images could largely alleviate the burden of clinicians. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Feature Selection guided Deep Forest (AFS-DF) for COVID-19 classification based on chest CT images. Specifically, we first extract location-specific features from CT images. Then, in order to capture the high-level representation of these features with the relatively small-scale data, we leverage a deep forest model to learn high-level representation of the features. Moreover, we propose a feature selection method based on the trained deep forest model to reduce the redundancy of features, where the feature selection could be adaptively incorporated with the COVID-19 classification model. We evaluated our proposed AFS-DF on COVID-19 dataset with 1495 patients of COVID-19 and 1027 patients of community acquired pneumonia (CAP). The accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE) and AUC achieved by our method are 91.79%, 93.05%, 89.95% and 96.35%, respectively. Experimental results on the COVID-19 dataset suggest that the proposed AFS-DF achieves superior performance in COVID-19 vs. CAP classification, compared with 4 widely used machine learning methods.

Recently, the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly across the world. Due to the large number of affected patients and heavy labor for doctors, computer-aided diagnosis with machine learning algorithm is urgently needed, and could largely reduce the efforts of clinicians and accelerate the diagnosis process. Chest computed tomography (CT) has been recognized as an informative tool for diagnosis of the disease. In this study, we propose to conduct the diagnosis of COVID-19 with a series of features extracted from CT images. To fully explore multiple features describing CT images from different views, a unified latent representation is learned which can completely encode information from different aspects of features and is endowed with promising class structure for separability. Specifically, the completeness is guaranteed with a group of backward neural networks (each for one type of features), while by using class labels the representation is enforced to be compact within COVID-19/community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and also a large margin is guaranteed between different types of pneumonia. In this way, our model can well avoid overfitting compared to the case of directly projecting highdimensional features into classes. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms all comparison methods, and rather stable performances are observed when varying the numbers of training data.

This paper illustrates five different techniques to assess the distinctiveness of topics, key terms and features, speed of information dissemination, and network behaviors for Covid19 tweets. First, we use pattern matching and second, topic modeling through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to generate twenty different topics that discuss case spread, healthcare workers, and personal protective equipment (PPE). One topic specific to U.S. cases would start to uptick immediately after live White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings, implying that many Twitter users are paying attention to government announcements. We contribute machine learning methods not previously reported in the Covid19 Twitter literature. This includes our third method, Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), that identifies unique clustering-behavior of distinct topics to improve our understanding of important themes in the corpus and help assess the quality of generated topics. Fourth, we calculated retweeting times to understand how fast information about Covid19 propagates on Twitter. Our analysis indicates that the median retweeting time of Covid19 for a sample corpus in March 2020 was 2.87 hours, approximately 50 minutes faster than repostings from Chinese social media about H7N9 in March 2013. Lastly, we sought to understand retweet cascades, by visualizing the connections of users over time from fast to slow retweeting. As the time to retweet increases, the density of connections also increase where in our sample, we found distinct users dominating the attention of Covid19 retweeters. One of the simplest highlights of this analysis is that early-stage descriptive methods like regular expressions can successfully identify high-level themes which were consistently verified as important through every subsequent analysis.

In this paper, we present a novel method for line artefacts quantification in lung ultrasound (LUS) images of COVID-19 patients. We formulate this as a non-convex regularisation problem involving a sparsity-enforcing, Cauchy-based penalty function, and the inverse Radon transform. We employ a simple local maxima detection technique in the Radon transform domain, associated with known clinical definitions of line artefacts. Despite being non-convex, the proposed method has guaranteed convergence via a proximal splitting algorithm and accurately identifies both horizontal and vertical line artefacts in LUS images. In order to reduce the number of false and missed detection, our method includes a two-stage validation mechanism, which is performed in both Radon and image domains. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method in comparison to the current state-of-the-art B-line identification method and show a considerable performance gain with 87% correctly detected B-lines in LUS images of nine COVID-19 patients. In addition, owing to its fast convergence, which takes around 12 seconds for a given frame, our proposed method is readily applicable for processing LUS image sequences.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is highly contagious with limited treatment options. Early and accurate diagnosis of Covid-19 is crucial in reducing the spread of the disease and its accompanied mortality. Currently, detection by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the gold standard of outpatient and inpatient detection of Covid-19. RT-PCR is a rapid method, however, its accuracy in detection is only ~70-75%. Another approved strategy is computed tomography (CT) imaging. CT imaging has a much higher sensitivity of ~80-98%, but similar accuracy of 70%. To enhance the accuracy of CT imaging detection, we developed an open-source set of algorithms called CovidCTNet that successfully differentiates Covid-19 from community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and other lung diseases. CovidCTNet increases the accuracy of CT imaging detection to 90% compared to radiologists (70%). The model is designed to work with heterogeneous and small sample sizes independent of the CT imaging hardware. In order to facilitate the detection of Covid-19 globally and assist radiologists and physicians in the screening process, we are releasing all algorithms and parametric details in an open-source format. Open-source sharing of our CovidCTNet enables developers to rapidly improve and optimize services, while preserving user privacy and data ownership.

Coronavirus Family Tree The University of Washington Virology lab, which is testing samples for coronavirus, tweeted last night.…

After Governor Jay Inslee announced a prohibition on gatherings of 250 people or more in three Washington counties (Snohomish, King, Pierce) on Wednesday, and with public health concerns growing over the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations in Spokane are following suit. The Inlander will be frequently updating its online calendar of events to reflect local cancelations as we hear of them.…

We at the Inlander are committed to keeping people informed and connected throughout the coronavirus outbreak. We'll continue to update this page with the latest headlines.…

ON INLANDER.COM WORLD: Roughly two weeks after Canada's deadliest mass shooting, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced an immediate ban on what he called “military-style assault weapons.”…

ON INLANDER.COM NATION: Even as U.S. President Donald Trump urges states to reopen their economies, his own administration projects that the death toll from COVID-19 will spike to 3,000 people per day.…

The latest issue of the Inlander is hitting newsstands today. Find it at your local grocery store and hundreds of other locations; use this map to find a pickup point near you.…

At every level of America's food system, mandated closures and outbreaks of COVID-19 have interrupted the finely tuned network that normally gets food from farmers and food processors to restaurants, grocery stores and food banks.…

If you go to check how many people are hospitalized with COVID-19 in Spokane, the Spokane County Regional Health District website will give you an answer. Right now, it lists eight people as currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and that number has been trending downward.…

Q: I recently read that a combination of the drugs hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin might be effective against COVID-19. I have diabetes and I am at risk for this viral infection.…

No, Weed Does Not Cure the Virus To a degree perhaps not before seen in modern history, the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing a lot of people and institutions for what they really are, good and bad. Cold, hard reality has a way of doing that.…

Small, little-known companies are selling CBD as a cure-all. While the Trump Administration has deregulated right and left — for instance, allowing polluters to go hog wild — the Food and Drug Administration isn't effing around when it comes to cracking down on companies selling supposed cures for the COVID-19 virus. Several of those targeted companies make CBD.…

This month alone, Oakland-based, family-owned Mr. Espresso has already donated over 2,500 pounds of coffee to COVID-19 relief efforts all over the Bay Area.

During the first two weeks of April, the 42-year-old company — founded in Alameda by enterprising Italian-born Carlo Di Ruocco and now renowned as the first and currently only outfit in the nation that uses oak wood to roast its beans — has given coffee to the Alameda County Community Food Bank and San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, Frontline Foods, East Bay FeedER, Clinica de La Raza, St. Anthony’s Dining Room, Loaves and Fishes Family Kitchen, and other food-, health-, homeless-, youth-, and family-assistance programs.…

Weeks have passed, and DJs the world over have settled into the reality of sheltering in place. As efforts to combat COVID-19 push on, the masses are staying at home. Clubs have shuttered their doors, bars and restaurants are no more, and non-essential businesses are closed. But in this primetime of social distancing, there has […]

The post Streaming L(o)ive In The Time of COVID-19: What’s the future for DJ live streaming? appeared first on DJ TechTools.

Coming on the heels of the AB5 trauma, the coronavirus lockdown poses an extra economic threat. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all facets of life in California and the world.…

News you don't want to miss for April 7:

1. A nursing home in Orinda is being hit hard by a covid-19 outbreak that has infected 49 people, including 27 residents and 22 staff members, the East Bay Times reports.…

News you don't want to miss for April 9:

1. Six residents at a nursing home in Hayward have died from covid-19, the East Bay Times reports.…

News you don't want to miss for Easter Weekend:

Oakland will temporarily close 74 miles of city streets to automobile traffic in an effort to give ample space for pedestrians, bike riders, and runners during the covid-19 shelter in place, The Guardian reports.…

News you don't want to miss for April 13:

1. "If the country’s most popular coronavirus model proves accurate, California will reach the peak of its outbreak this Wednesday," the San Francisco Chronicle reports, when it will reach a predicted 66 deaths.…

News you don't want to miss for April 14:

1. Six of the 15 confirmed covid-19 cases at Santa Rita Jail have recovered, the East Bay Times reports.…

News you don't want to miss for April 15:

1. The number of covid-19 deaths in Alameda County increased from 23 to 36 over a two-day period, SFGate reports.…

News you don't want to miss for April 20:

1. Fifty-one employees at Safeway's distribution warehouse in Tracy have been infected with covid-19, including one death, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.…

News you don't want to miss for April 21:

1. Those who suffer the effects of poor air quality are at greater risk of complications associated with the coronavirus, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.…

News you don't want to miss for April 24:

1. San Francisco Mayor London Breed provided a hint on Friday that the city's shelter in place order will be extended past May 4, possibly weeks or a month, KPIX reports.…

News you don't want to miss for April 30:

1. The five fired Oakland police officers involved in the shooting of Joshua Pawlik in 2018 were reinstated after it was found the Oakland Police Commission violated the Brown Act, the state law for transparency in public meetings, KPIX reports.…

News you don't want to miss for May 1:

1. Oakland's lawsuit against the Raiders and the NFL over the team's relocation to Las Vegas was dismissed by a federal court judge on Thursday, according to Bleacher Report.…

A HAMPSHIRE ferry operator hit by the lockdown has launched a Crowdfunding campaign in a bid to keep the service afloat.

Omid Safi, professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke, knew that the months of April and May would be difficult for the Muslim community this year. Like Easter and Passover, the holy month of Ramadan will be celebrated much differently due to COVID-19’s ongoing social distancing restrictions.

Nursing homes are the source of more than 40% of North Carolina’s reported COVID-19 deaths so far. These facilities house some of our most vulnerable community members, many of whom need personal care — things like help going to the bathroom or brushing teeth. As of Tuesday, the data from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services shows that 48 nursing homes and 20 residential care facilities (which include adult and family care homes) have outbreaks .

Can you do condom demonstration over Zoom? What about teaching comprehensive sexual education? In the midst of a pandemic, the answer is unclear. On this segment of Embodied, host Anita Rao talks with Elizabeth Finley about gaps in sex ed brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.

Apple has updated Siri to answer some simple questions about Covid-19 for users in the USA.

In this podcast, Troy Larson shows us how voice queries like “Hey Siri, do I have the coronavirus?” will lead you through a series of quick questions about symptoms such as a dry cough and shortness of breath.

Siri is by no means a replacement for a medical professional, but its answers have been provided by the US Public Health Service, and Siri can direct you to the Centers for Disease Control website or even prompt you to ring the emergency services.

Guests of this Friday Feature Interview of the Week were Megan Robinson, Executive Director of the Western NC American Red Cross and United Way of Greenville County, SC Executive Director Megan Barp. Both agencies are important, year-round organizations, with staff/volunteers that want to offer support and services, especially during the coronavirus crisis. However, these groups could use additional volunteers and donors to achieve full capacity. This conversation first aired on April 3, 2020. Posted by Host and Producer of The Friday Feature- Paul Foster, WNCW Senior Producer, News Director, and Morning Edition Regional Host

Logan County Sheriff Randall Dodds says he is laying off 21 staffers, includuing deputies and jail guards starting on May 2.

Ohio is ramping up its ability to test for COVID-19, which means a big increase in testing by the end of May. Statehouse correspondent Andy Chow reports Gov. Mike DeWine is now announcing new protocols to follow since testing won't be as limited as it once was.

Updated at 5:02 p.m. ET It was supposed to be a day of parades, a vast party that would transcend borders and bring generations together, not unlike the spontaneous euphoria that swept through victorious European allies when Nazi Germany finally surrendered. But instead of a mega-event, leaders in London, Paris, Moscow and other capitals, observed the 75th anniversary of V-E Day at a diminished level Friday due to the COVID-19 pandemic. French President Emmanuel Macron led a small ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe, looking out over an empty Champs-Élysées. A 93-year-old veteran of World War II observes a moment of silence at the Cenotaph war memorial in London, where British residents — like much of Europe — marked a subdued 75th anniversary of V-E Day. Daniel Leal-Olivas / AFP via Getty Images Because of health risks the disease poses to older people, many veterans of the war were forced to avoid travel and keep their distance at public gatherings. "The veterans are of course getting

Magician and animal trainer Roy Horn, of the legendary Las Vegas duo Siegfied and Roy, died Friday from complications related to COVID-19. Horn tested positive last week. He was 75. "The world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend," Siegfried Fischbacher said of his partner in a statement. "Roy was a fighter his whole life including during these final days. I give my heartfelt appreciation to the team of doctors, nurses and staff at Mountain View Hospital who worked heroically against this insidious virus that ultimately took Roy's life." Roy Horn was born in Germany in 1944. He and Siegfried began their act in Las Vegas in 1967. In 1989 they began a 14-year run at the Mirage Resort performing illusions with exotic animals, making tigers, lions, even elephants vanish and reappear. In October of 2003, Roy Horn was performing with a 400-pound white tiger named Mantecore when the great cat grabbed him by the throat before a stunned audience and dragged him

President Trump wants states to begin relaxing stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses after the spread of the coronavirus pummeled the global economy and killed millions of jobs. The White House coronavirus task force released guidelines on April 16 to encourage state governors to adopt a phased approach to lifting restrictions across the country. Some states have moved ahead without meeting the criteria . The task force rejected a set of additional detailed draft recommendations for schools, restaurants, churches and mass transit systems from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it considered " overly prescriptive ." A number of states have already begun to lift restrictions, allowing for businesses including hair salons, diners and tattoo parlors to once again begin accepting customers. Health experts have warned that reopening too quickly could result in a potential rebound in cases. States are supposed to wait to begin lifting any restrictions until they have a 14

Magician and animal trainer Roy Horn, of the legendary Las Vegas duo Siegfied and Roy, died Friday from complications related to COVID-19. Horn tested positive last week. He was 75. "The world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend," Siegfried Fischbacher said of his partner in a statement. "Roy was a fighter his whole life including during these final days. I give my heartfelt appreciation to the team of doctors, nurses and staff at Mountain View Hospital who worked heroically against this insidious virus that ultimately took Roy's life." Roy Horn was born in Germany in 1944. He and Siegfried began their act in Las Vegas in 1967. In 1989 they began a 14-year run at the Mirage Resort performing illusions with exotic animals, making tigers, lions, even elephants vanish and reappear. In October of 2003, Roy Horn was performing with a 400-pound white tiger named Mantecore when the great cat grabbed him by the throat before a stunned audience and dragged him

President Trump wants states to begin relaxing stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses after the spread of the coronavirus pummeled the global economy and killed millions of jobs. The White House coronavirus task force released guidelines on April 16 to encourage state governors to adopt a phased approach to lifting restrictions across the country. Some states have moved ahead without meeting the criteria . The task force rejected a set of additional detailed draft recommendations for schools, restaurants, churches and mass transit systems from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it considered " overly prescriptive ." A number of states have already begun to lift restrictions, allowing for businesses including hair salons, diners and tattoo parlors to once again begin accepting customers. Health experts have warned that reopening too quickly could result in a potential rebound in cases. States are supposed to wait to begin lifting any restrictions until they have a 14

Police are responding to an increased number of domestic violence calls during the coronavirus pandemic. An increase had been expected because many women have to shelter-in-place with their abusers. Shelters had prepared for an increase in service requests, but those calls aren't coming as frequently as anticipated. As WEMU'S David Fair found out from Safehouse Center executive director Barbara Niess-May, that is worrisome for a number of reasons.