Fear, anxiety and even paranoia can proliferate during a pandemic. Such conditions, even when subclinical, tend to be a product of personal and predispositional factors, as well as shared cultural influences, including religious, literary, film, and gaming, all of which can lead to emotional and less than rational responses. They can render people vulnerable to engage in implausible conspiracy theories about the causes of illness and governmental responses to it. They can also lead people to give credence to simplistic and unscientific misrepresentations about medications and devices which are claimed to prevent, treat or cure disease. In turn such vulnerability creates predatory opportunities for the unscrupulous. This article notes the eruption of quackery during the 1889-1892 Russian Flu and the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu and the emergence during 2020 of spurious claims during the COVID-19 pandemic. It identifies consumer protection strategies and interventions formulated during the 2020 pandemic. Using examples from the United States, Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom, it argues that during a pandemic there is a need for three responses by government to the risks posed by conspiracy theories and false representations: calm, scientifically-based messaging from public health authorities; cease and desist warnings directed toward those making extravagant or inappropriate claims; and the taking of assertive and well publicised legal action against individuals and entities that make false representations during a pandemic in order to protect consumers rendered vulnerable by their emotional responses to the phenomenology of the pandemic.
Key words: Pandemics | COVID-19 | vulnerabilities | false representations | conspiracy theories | apocalyptic computer games | pandemic films | pandemic literature | quackery | fear | dread | consumer protection | public health responses | cease and desist orders | prosecution

The Covid-19 pandemic has long-lasting impacts that require the hotel sector to revise, innovate and transform their businesses. However, the literature related to this area remains vastly under- developed. Based on 219 articles collected from global news media and an integrated crisis management framework, this research note map out "strategic responses" from the hotel sector and suggest implications for hotels to address the evolving pandemic situation. Three modifications were proposed to refine and further develop a pandemic crisis management framework.
Keywords: Covid-19 | recovery hotel | Leximancer | news media | crisis management | strategies

Background and aims: Healthcare delivery requires the support of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and Machine Learning to fight and look ahead against the new diseases. We aim to review the role of AI as a decisive technology to analyze, prepare us for prevention and fight with COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and other pandemics. Methods: The rapid review of the literature is done on the database of Pubmed, Scopus and Google Scholar using the keyword of COVID-19 or Coronavirus and Artificial Intelligence or AI. Collected the latest information regarding AI for COVID-19, then analyzed the same to identify its possible application for this disease. Results: We have identified seven significant applications of AI for COVID-19 pandemic. This technology plays an important role to detect the cluster of cases and to predict where this virus will affect in future by collecting and analyzing all previous data. Conclusions: Healthcare organizations are in an urgent need for decision-making technologies to handle this virus and help them in getting proper suggestions in real-time to avoid its spread. AI works in a proficient way to mimic like human intelligence. It may also play a vital role in understanding and suggesting the development of a vaccine for COVID-19. This result-driven technology is used for proper screening, analyzing, prediction and tracking of current patients and likely future patients. The significant applications are applied to tracks data of confirmed, recovered and death cases.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI) | AI Applications | COVID-19 | Coronavirus | Pandemic

Background: The inability to test at scale has become humanity’s Achille’s heel in the ongoing war against the COVID-19 pandemic. A scalable screening tool would be a game changer. Building on the prior work on coughbased diagnosis of respiratory diseases, we propose, develop and test an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered screening solution for COVID-19 infection that is deployable via a smartphone app. The app, named AI4COVID- 19 records and sends three 3-s cough sounds to an AI engine running in the cloud, and returns a result within 2 min. Methods: Cough is a symptom of over thirty non-COVID-19 related medical conditions. This makes the diagnosis of a COVID-19 infection by cough alone an extremely challenging multidisciplinary problem. We address this problem by investigating the distinctness of pathomorphological alterations in the respiratory system induced by COVID-19 infection when compared to other respiratory infections. To overcome the COVID-19 cough training data shortage we exploit transfer learning. To reduce the misdiagnosis risk stemming from the complex dimensionality of the problem, we leverage a multi-pronged mediator centered risk-averse AI architecture. Results: Results show AI4COVID-19 can distinguish among COVID-19 coughs and several types of non-COVID-19 coughs. The accuracy is promising enough to encourage a large-scale collection of labeled cough data to gauge the generalization capability of AI4COVID-19. AI4COVID-19 is not a clinical grade testing tool. Instead, it offers a screening tool deployable anytime, anywhere, by anyone. It can also be a clinical decision assistance tool used to channel clinical-testing and treatment to those who need it the most, thereby saving more lives.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence | COVID-19 | Preliminary medical diagnosis | Pre-screening | Public healthcare