Jude Dzevela Kong

York University · Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Very few social media studies have been done on South African user-generated content during the COVID-19 pandemic and even fewer using hand-labelling over automated methods. Vaccination is a major tool in the fight against the pandemic, but vaccine hesitancy jeopardizes any public health effort. In this study, sentiment analysis on South African tw...

In this paper, Twitter posts discussing the COVID-19 vaccine booster shot from nine African countries were classified according to sentiments to understand the effect of citizens’ sentiments towards accepting the booster shot. The number of booster shot-related tweets significantly positively correlated with the increase in booster shots across dif...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed major flaws in the PPE supply chain and healthcare facilities are at high risk of becoming overwhelmed beyond their capacity. Therefore, it is paramount to develop new technologies that can be leveraged as an early warning and detection system. OBJECTIVE In this study, Twitter sentiment analysis was uti...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has developed into a pandemic. Data-driven techniques can be used to inform and guide public health decision- and policy-makers. In generalizing the spread of a virus over a large area, such as a province, it must be assumed that the transmission occurs as a stochastic process. It is therefore very difficult...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been spreading worldwide for over two years, with millions of reported cases and deaths. The deployment of mathematical modeling in the fight against COVID-19 has recorded tremendous success. However, most of these models target the epidemic phase of the disease. The development o...

The first report of the Omicron variant triggered a lot of emotions towards vaccination in South Africa. These emotions are mostly expressed on social media such as Twitter. The result could weaken the confidence level of users even before they are vaccinated. Identifying these emotions and how they change before and during the Omicron variant can...

Social media contains useful information about people and society that could help advance research in many different areas of health (e.g. by applying opinion mining, emotion/sentiment analysis and statistical analysis) such as mental health, health surveillance, socio-economic inequality and gender vulnerability. User demographics provide rich inf...

Aim Many freshwater fishes are migrating poleward to more thermally suitable habitats in response to warming climates. In this study, we aimed to identify which freshwater fishes are most sensitive to climatic changes and asked: (i) how fast are lakes warming? (ii) how fast are fishes moving? and (iii) are freshwater fishes tracking climate? Locat...

BACKGROUND The currently ongoing global monkeypox outbreak is disproportionately affecting the gay/bisexual “men having sex with men” (gbMSM) community. OBJECTIVE the aim of this study is to use the posts on Twitter to study country-level variations in topics and sentiments toward monkeypox-2SLGBTQIAP+ related topics. Previous infectious outbreaks...

The global economy has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries are experiencing a severe and destructive recession. A significant number of firms and businesses have gone bankrupt or been scaled down, and many individuals have lost their jobs. The main goal of this study is to support policy- and decision-makers with additional and r...

Paralympic powerlifting (PP), formerly known as “International Paralympic Committee” (IPC) powerlifting, is the format of powerlifting adapted for athletes with disabilities, and it differs from the version for able-bodied athletes in that it consists of bench press only. According to the mandate of the IPC, PP athletes should be enabled to achieve...

The still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted athletes, and, in particular, para-athletes and athletes with disabilities. However, there is no scholarly appraisal on this topic. Therefore, a critical scoping review of the literature was conducted. We were able to retrieve sixteen relevant studies. The sample size ranged from 4 to 18...

We conducted an observational retrospective study on patients hospitalized with COVID-19, during March 05, 2020, to October 28, 2021, and developed an agent-based model to evaluate effectiveness of recommended healthcare resources (hospital beds and ventilators) management strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic in Gauteng, South Africa. We measure...

Background: Covid-19 is one of the greatest health crises of 21st century, affecting many aspects of life. It emerged at the time Africa is battling with a plethora of other public health issues. To guide disease response, research is indispensable. but it needs funding. We evaluated the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on Africa's priority disease (PD)...

we read with great interest the letter by Giacomelli et al. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Circadian rhythms are a series of endogenous autonomous oscillators that are generated by the molecular circadian clock which coordinates and synchronizes internal time with the external environment in a 24-h daily cycle (that can also be shorter or longer than 24 h). Besides daily rhythms, there exist as well other biological rhythms that have dif...

Monkeypox, a milder disease compared to smallpox, is caused by a virus initially discovered and described in 1958 by the prominent Danish virologist von Magnus, who was investigating an infectious outbreak affecting monkey colonies. Currently, officially starting from May 2022, an outbreak of monkeypox is ongoing, with 51,000 cases being notified a...

p>In this research, we collected 70,000 COVID–19 vaccine-related geotagged Twitter posts from nine African countries. The duration is from December 2020 to February 2022. We used VADER to classify the tweets into three sentiment classes (positive, negative, and neutral). The outputs were validated using machine learning classification algorithms, i...

p>In this research, we collected 70,000 COVID–19 vaccine-related geotagged Twitter posts from nine African countries. The duration is from December 2020 to February 2022. We used VADER to classify the tweets into three sentiment classes (positive, negative, and neutral). The outputs were validated using machine learning classification algorithms, i...

Monkeypox is an emerging zoonotic disease caused by the monkeypox virus, which is an infectious agent belonging to the genus Orthopoxvirus. Currently, commencing from the end of April 2022, an outbreak of monkeypox is ongoing, with more than 43,000 cases reported as of 23 August 2022, involving 99 countries and territories across all the six World...

Monkeypox, a zoonotic disease caused by the monkeypox virus, is emerging as a potential sexually transmitted disease (STD). Starting from the end of April 2022, a 1 monkeypox outbreak is ongoing. Canada has become one of the most affected countries in the WHO Region of the Americas. Mathematical modeling plays a crucial role in monitoring, controll...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the global economy. In this paper, we use the Phillips curve to compare and analyze the macroeconomics of three different countries with distinct income levels, namely, lower-middle (Nigeria), upper-middle (South Africa), and high (Canada) income. We aim to (1) find macroeconomic changes in the...

Monkeypox is an emerging zoonotic disease caused by the monkeypox virus, which is an infectious agent belonging to the family of Poxviruses. Currently, commencing from the end of April 2022, an outbreak of monkeypox is ongoing, with more than 25,000 cases being reported as of August 3, 2022, involving 90 countries and territories across all the six...

Amidst the COVID-19 vaccination, Twitter is one of the most popular platforms for discussions about the COVID-19 vaccination. These types of discussions most times lead to a compromise of public confidence toward the vaccine. The text-based data generated by these discussions are used by researchers to extract topics and perform sentiment analysis...

After struggling with COVID-19 pandemic for two years, the world is finally recovering from this crisis. Nonetheless, another virus, Monkeypox, is quickly spreading throughout the world and in non-endemic regions and continents, threatening the world to a new pandemic. Twitter as a popular social media has successfully been used for predicting and...

Currently, commencing from the end of April-early May 2022, an outbreak of monkeypox, a disease clinically similar to smallpox but generally milder, caused by a poxvirus, is ongoing. Here, in this review paper, we have shown that the emergence of the monkeypox can be understood within the complex ecosystem of sexually transmitted diseases and the i...

Monkeypox, a milder disease compared to smallpox, is caused by a virus initially discovered and described in 1958 by the prominent Danish virologist von Magnus, who was investigating an infectious outbreak affecting monk colonies. Currently, starting from May 2022, an outbreak of monkeypox is ongoing, with more than 2,100 cases being notified as of...

This paper aims to incorporate a high order stochastic perturbation into a SIQR epidemic model with transient prophylaxis and lasting prophylaxis. The existence and uniqueness of the global positive solution is proven and a stochastic condition in order to study the extinction of an infectious disease is established. The existence of a stationary d...

An emerging outbreak of monkeypox infection is quickly spreading worldwide, being currently reported in more than 30 countries, with slightly less than one thousand cases. In the present preliminary report, we collected and synthesized early data concerning epidemiological trends and clinical features of the ongoing outbreak and we compared them wi...

An emerging outbreak of monkeypox infection is quickly spreading worldwide, being currently reported in more than 30 countries, with slightly less than one thousand cases. In the present preliminary report, we collected and synthesized early data concerning epidemiological trends and clinical features of the ongoing outbreak and we compared them wi...

Country reported case counts suggested a slow spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa. However, due to inadequate public awareness, unestablished monitoring practices, limited testing, ineffective diagnosis, stigmas attached to being infected with SARS-CoV-2, self-medication, and the use of complementary/alterna...

COVID-19 has been prevalent worldwide for about 2 years now and has brought unprecedented challenges to our society. Before vaccines were available, the main disease intervention strategies were non-pharmaceutical. Starting December 2020, in Ontario, Canada, vaccines were approved for administering to vulnerable individuals and gradually expanded t...

Self-medication and the use of complementary medicine are common among people in the Global South for social, economic, and psychological reasons. Governments in these countries are generally faced with several challenges, including limited resources and poor infrastructure and patient health literacy. In this paper, we formulate and analyze a math...

Social media contains useful information about people and the society that could help advance research in many different areas (e.g. by applying opinion mining, emotion/sentiment analysis, and statistical analysis) such as business and finance, health, socio-economic inequality and gender vulnerability. User demographics provide rich information th...

Background To examine mental health during COVID-19 peaks, lockdown, and times of curfew, many studies have used the LPA/LCA person-centered approach to uncover and explore unobserved groups. However, the majority of research has focused only on negative psychological concepts to explain mental health. In this paper, we take another perspective to...

Cardiological disorders contribute to a significant portion of the global burden of disease. Cardiology can benefit from Big Data, which are generated and released by different sources and channels, like epidemiological surveys, national registries, electronic clinical records, claims-based databases (epidemiological Big Data), wet-lab, and next-ge...

Background: Globally, nonpharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19, including stay-at-home policies, limitations on gatherings and closure of public spaces, are being lifted. We explored the effect of lifting a stay-at-home policy on virus resurgence under different conditions. Methods: Using confirmed case data from Toronto, Canada, between Feb...

Background The “Coronavirus Disease 2019” (COVID-19) pandemic has become a major challenge for all healthcare systems worldwide, and besides generating a high toll of deaths, it has caused economic losses. Hospitals have played a key role in providing services to patients and the volume of hospital activities has been refocused on COVID-19 patients...

Background Rheumatological and dermatological disorders contribute to a significant portion of the global burden of disease. Big Data are increasingly having a more and more relevant role, being highly ubiquitous and pervasive in contemporary society and paving the way for new, unprecedented perspectives in biomedicine, including dermatology and rh...

The pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) took the world by surprise. Following the first outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019, several models have been developed to study and understand its transmission dynamics. Although the spread of COVID-19 is being slowed down by vaccination and other interventions, the...

Many countries have adopted border closures and other jurisdictions (provinces, states, cities, etc.) to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Such measures have significantly restricted population movement and have thus led to immense economic and social fallouts. We build a Susceptible-Exposed-Asymptomatic- Infectious (prodromal phase)- Infectious (w...

COVID-19 has been prevalent worldwide for about 2 years now and has brought unprecedented challenges to our society. Before vaccines were available, the main disease intervention strategies were non-pharmaceutical. Starting December 2020, in Ontario, Canada, vaccines were approved for administering to vulnerable individuals and gradually expanded t...

BACKGROUND While vaccination against the coronavirus (COVID–19) lasts, Twitter has become one of the social media platforms used to generate discussions about the COVID–19 vaccination. These types of discussions most times lead to a compromise of public confidence towards the vaccine. The text-based data generated by these discussions are used by r...

Introduction Metabolic risks including high body mass index, high fasting plasma glucose, high low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high systolic blood pressure, kidney dysfunction and low bone mineral density, contribute heavy burden to the US health systems. We aimed to investigate the burden attributable to metabolic risks in the US from 1990 to...

After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and its spread across the world, countries have adopted containment measures to stop its transmission, limit fatalities, and relieve hospitals from straining and overwhelming conditions imposed by the virus. Many countries implemented social distancing and lockdown strategies that negatively impacted their e...

In the present paper, we aimed to determine the influence of various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) enforced during the first wave of COVID-19 across countries on the spreading rate of COVID-19 during the second wave. For this purpose, we took into account national-level climatic, environmental, clinical, health, economic, pollution, socia...

Bacteria-bacteriophage cycles facilitate Cholera outbreak cycles: an indirect Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Bacteria-Phage (iSIRBP) model-based mathematical study, Journal of Biological Dynamics, 16:1, 29-43, ABSTRACT Cholera is an acute enteric infectious disease caused by the Gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Despite a huge body of resear...

The agriculture sector is one of the backbones of many countries’ economies. Its processes have been changing to enable technology adoption to increase productivity, quality, and sustainable development. In this research, we present a scientific mapping of the adoption of precision techniques and breakthrough technologies in agriculture, so-called...

Background This article presents the first detailed analysis of the prevalence and disability burden of Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS) from 1990 to 2019 by cause, age, sex, and Socio-demographic Index (SDI) in 204 countries and territories. Methods Data from the Global Burden of Diseases Study (GBD) 2019 were used. GBD 2019 modelled the prevalence...

Introduction The objective of this study is to examine the temporal trends and patterns of regional and socioeconomic disparities in cardiovascular disease (CVD) in Canada during 2005–2016. Methods A total of 670 000 adults aged ≥20 years who participated in the Canadian Community Health Surveys between 2005 and 2016 were enrolled for this study....

The pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) took the world by surprise. Following the first outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019, several models have been developed to study and understand its transmission dynamics. Although the spread of COVID-19 is being slowed down by vaccination and other interventions, the...

Background: In February 2020, the Ministry of Health and Medical Education in Iran announced the first case of COVID-19. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the number of CT-Scans and MRI services in public hospitals in western Iran. Methods: We collected CT-scans and MRI services data from 18 public hospitals via...

Adherence to public health policies such as the non-pharmaceutical interventions implemented against COVID-19 plays a major role in reducing infections and controlling the spread of the diseases. In addition, understanding the transmission dynamics of the disease is also important in order to make and implement efficient public health policies. In...

BACKGROUND Global economy has been hardly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries are experiencing a severe and destructive recession. Unemployment rate is very important to policy makers as it provide a key indicator of overall labour market and wider economic conditions. Despite its relevance, there is usually a delay in the availability of...

While there are several modeling studies on herd immunity in western countries, there is a dearth of information concerning the potential achievement of herd immunity in the African continent. Therefore, the present review is aimed at providing readers with an up-dated, thought-provoking piece on COVID-19 and herd immunity in African countries. Her...