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The 2022 anti–zero Covid White Paper protests that erupted in China and its diaspora demonstrated the intertwinement of politics and performance in contemporary China. The symbolic dimensions of blank sheets of A4 paper and other performative tactics used in these demonstrations exemplify the shifting roles of performance art in the field of contemporary Chinese art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the challenges brought about by the devastating COVID-19 pandemic in China and the Chinese government's increasingly stringent regulatory policies, this paper poses the following research questions: During the pandemic and in interactions with the government, why did some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) survive while others were shut down, although most of those that survived were small and medium-sized NGOs? In addressing this question, this paper delves into the strategies adopted by small and medium-sized NGOs to cope with COVID-19. Using data drawn from three years of field observations and research in six major cities in China, this paper finds that four types of small and medium-sized NGOs resorted to different strategies that followed degree of competitiveness and scope of main business. The scarcity of resources resulting to the pandemic plunged NGOs into a competitive survival posture; thus, the strategies for the four types of small and medium-sized NGOs achieved three levels of effectiveness, namely good, medium, and poor. The findings of this paper shed significant light on the diversity and complexity of the survival and development of NGOs under the authoritarian regime of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Residents' adoption of preventive behaviours proved beneficial in preventing the large-scale transmission of the virus during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. It is critical to investigate how social media triggers residents' preventive behaviour decisions during the COVID-19 outbreak. Methods: This paper selected online shopping as a specific preventive behaviour for empirical investigation. An online cross-sectional survey was conducted through the Sojump website from 1 to 15 March 2020, and a total of 1,289 valid questionnaires were collected from China. This paper uses multiple regression analysis to investigate the heterogeneous impacts of different information sources on residents' online shopping willingness and online shopping behaviour and the heterogeneous impacts of different information content in social media on the transformation of residents' online shopping willingness and online shopping behaviour. Results: The findings indicate that both official-media and self-media positively promote residents' online shopping willingness and behaviour, with official-media having a stronger promotional effect than self-media. Furthermore, official-media and self-media can collaboratively promote residents' online shopping willingness and online shopping behaviour. The ease-of-use and usefulness of information significantly promoted the transformation of residents' online shopping willingness. Conclusions: This study analyses the heterogeneous impacts of social media on residents' preventive behaviours from the perspectives of information source differentiation and information content differentiation, which enriches related studies and provides feasible paths for promoting residents' preventive behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019), the Chinese government has taken strict measures to prevent and control the epidemic. Although the spread of the virus has been controlled, people's daily life and work have been affected and restricted to varying degrees. Thus people have different sentiments, these may affect people's implementation and compliance with the policies, thus affecting the effectiveness of epidemic prevention and control. At present, few pieces of literature have analyzed the relationships between people's feelings, policies, and epidemic trends. The object of this paper is to analyze the text content on social media, to find out the impact of the epidemic blockade policy on the public mood and the concerns expressed by the public about policies changes, and the interaction between policies and epidemic states at different stages of the epidemic. In this paper, we collected the posts of two cities where the epidemic occurred at the same time for analysis and comparative study. On the one hand, we revealed the changes in public attention and attitudes in the two regions during the epidemic, the other hand, it also reflects the differences in public sentiment between the two regions, as well as the correlation between emotions and policies and epidemic trends when different policies are adopted under different circumstances. The obtained results have a certain guiding significance for public health departments to formulate reasonable epidemic prevention policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore what the travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal about the changing geographies of mobilities and the making of homo sacer, the latter constituted through differentiated control of mobilities. Implemented to protect U.S. public health, travel restrictions imposed on travelers from Mainland China during the early days of the pandemic exemplify how sovereign power that declares a state of emergency and creates bare life can be readily applied to groups of people who previously had privileged access to global mobility. In this sense, bare life does not refer to fixed and disadvantaged social categories but is rather contingently and contextually constituted, through the works of hybrid sovereign regimes. At the same time, however, these travelers are not reduced to a state of zero-agency but reside within a liminal space between soft and hard cosmopolitanisms, as they can still deploy agency and cosmopolitan capital to achieve certain degrees of mobility. By examining how Chinese travelers navigated various travel restrictions and the constantly changing policies to travel to the U.S., this paper explores new spaces of exception and forms of bare life, and argues that homo sacer is dynamically, relationally and recursively constructed, both through apparatus of control and the agency of travelers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 dramatically changed the way businesses operates. The focus of this paper is virtual trade fairs organized by trade fair organizers in China whose service delivery model was transformed to meet the new needs of customers. Using one well-grounded case and several rounds of interview data in three stages, the paper aims to explore the impact Covid-19 has generated on the event services sector and how SERVQUAL could be applied in an emerging virtual setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Data related to the counting of elements of variable character are frequently encountered in time series studies. This paper brings forward a new class of k$$ k $$th‐order dependence‐driven random coefficient mixed thinning integer‐valued autoregressive time series model (DDRCMTINAR(k$$ k $$)) to deal with such data. Stationarity and ergodicity properties of the proposed model are derived in detail. The unknown parameters are estimated by conditional least squares, and modified quasi‐likelihood and asymptotic normality of the obtained parameter estimators is established. The performances of the adopted estimate methods are checked via simulations, which present that modified quasi‐likelihood estimators perform better than the conditional least squares considering the proportion of within‐Ω$$ \Omega $$ estimates in certain regions of the parameter space. The validity and practical utility of the model are investigated by epileptic seizure data and COVID‐19 data of suspected cases in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crises constitute ideal opportunities for authoritarian leaders to promote certain narratives, shaping reality in their favor and crafting their own preferred storylines about current events. In other words: they serve authoritarian leaders on a silver platter the opportunity to instrumentalize these unforeseen circumstances to gain domestic political legitimacy by promoting strategic narratives. The COVID-19 pandemic was no exception in this regard. Ever since its onset in early 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was among the most active actors worldwide seeking to capitalize on the global crisis for legitimation purposes. Whether applying narratives of governance supremacy, portraying the People's Republic of China as a "global savior," or promoting emotionally appealing nationalistic narratives, the regime used the pandemic as a window of opportunity to rebrand its international role and enhance its domestic legitimacy. When observing the CCP's communication style over the course of 24 pandemic months (2020–2022), however, major shifts become apparent regarding the main narratives crafted in communication with national audiences. Based on this, the paper focuses on the role of such narratives for legitimation claims. Using exemplary media articles collected between the outbreak of the pandemic in China in late 2019 until the harsh Shanghai lockdown in spring 2022, it thus traces the narratives employed by Chinese state elites and explores how they are intertwined with nationalism and broader power claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government censorship—internet shutdowns, blockages, firewalls—impose significant barriers to the transnational flow of information despite the connective power of digital technologies. In this paper, we examine whether and how information flows across borders despite government censorship. We develop a semi-automated system that combines deep learning and human annotation to find co-occurring content across different social media platforms and languages. We use this system to detect co-occurring content between Twitter and Sina Weibo as Covid-19 spread globally, and we conduct in-depth investigations of co-occurring content to identify those that constitute an inflow of information from the global information ecosystem into China. We find that approximately one-fourth of content with relevance for China that gains widespread public attention on Twitter makes its way to Weibo. Unsurprisingly, Chinese state-controlled media and commercialized domestic media play a dominant role in facilitating these inflows of information. However, we find that Weibo users without traditional media or government affiliations are also an important mechanism for transmitting information into China. These results imply that while censorship combined with media control provide substantial leeway for the government to set the agenda, social media provides opportunities for non-institutional actors to influence the information environment. Methodologically, the system we develop offers a new approach for the quantitative analysis of cross-platform and cross-lingual communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In a context where synchronous online teaching has become a new trend of instruction for online education due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, it is valuable and insightful to examine what factors contribute to teachers' satisfaction with synchronous online teaching. Objective: Informed by the technology acceptance model (TAM), this study investigated English‐as‐a‐foreign‐language (EFL) university teachers' synchronous online teaching satisfaction in China from social (i.e., subjective norms), institutional (i.e., facilitating conditions), and individual (i.e., self‐efficacy, attitudes toward use, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use) levels during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Methods: A total of 250 in‐service EFL university teachers participated in this study. An online questionnaire was adaptively developed to measure teachers' perceptions of and satisfaction with synchronous online teaching. The structural equation modelling (i.e., path analyses) was performed to find out a model that can best represent EFL university teachers' synchronous online teaching satisfaction. Results and Conclusion: The results showed that facilitating conditions, self‐efficacy, attitudes toward use, and perceived usefulness are direct contributors to EFL university teachers' satisfaction with synchronous online teaching. Whereas, perceived ease of use, self‐efficacy, and subjective norms are indirect contributors through the mediation of attitudes toward use. Moreover, different from previous TAM research, facilitating conditions have been found to be the most significant direct factor positively contributing to satisfaction. The findings of this study are expected to shed light on how to enhance teachers' synchronous online teaching satisfaction. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: The technology acceptance model (TAM) has been frequently adopted to examine teachers' acceptance of technology in various contexts over the last two decades.The TAM model identifies three key factors that contribute to people's intention of technology use: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of, and attitudes toward technology use.Although the TAM model has been extensively examined in various technology‐supported teaching contexts, there has been a lack of focus on livestream technology‐supported synchronous online teaching. What the paper adds: EFL university teachers' synchronous online teaching satisfaction during the COVID‐19 in China.Teachers' satisfaction with synchronous online teaching is a joint interplay of individual (i.e., self‐efficacy, attitudes toward use, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use), institutional (i.e., facilitating conditions), and social (i.e., subjective norms) factors.Facilitating conditions, self‐efficacy, attitudes toward use, and perceived usefulness are direct contributors, while perceived ease of use, self‐efficacy, and subjective norms are indirect contributors to teachers' synchronous online teaching satisfaction through the mediation of attitudes toward use.Different from previous TAM research, facilitating conditions have been found to be the most significant direct factor positively contributing to satisfaction. Implications for practice and/or policy: This study offers a diagnostic measure for schools and universities to understand the status quo of their teachers' perceptions of and satisfaction with synchronous online teaching.Universities are advised to provide teachers with readily accessible support and training to enhance their self‐efficacy for synchronous online teaching so that their satisfaction with synchronous online teaching can be strengthened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: During an outbreak such as COVID-19, hospital staff needs to be in close contact with all types of patients visiting the hospital and the risk of cross-infection is extremely high. Payment and medication pickup is a mandatory part of a patient's hospital visit, with direct contact between healthcare workers and patients, and long waiting times in the hospital area, which can easily lead to the spread of disease infection. OBJECTIVE: This paper designed the prototype of a contactless smart medicine cabinet based on RFID technology and optimized the patient consultation and medication pickup process to address these problems. METHODS: We conducted a 50-day field observation of patients for consultation and medication pickup at the First Hospital in H city, Jiangsu Province, China, and randomly timed 1600 sets of data from Surgery (ophthalmology) and Internal patients, then we designed the prototype of a contactless smart medicine cabinet based on RFID technology, optimized the patient consultation and medication pickup process, comparing the traditional and intelligent models using AnyLogic. RESULTS: The results show that this contactless medicine cabinet was able to reduce the time taken by patients in consultation and medicine pickup by 18.74 minutes, increasing the overall efficiency of the consultation by 32.20%. The simulation revealed that this contactless intelligent medication pickup model was able to reduce the time taken by patients in consultation and medicine pickup, increasing the overall efficiency of the consultation, effectively reducing the frequency of contact between healthcare workers and patients, and reducing the risk of disease infection. CONCLUSION: The proposed technical model provides a new idea to solve the problems of long queues, low efficiency and high risk of infection for patients to consult and get medicine during epidemics. Especially within hospitals it has important theoretical and practical implications for epidemic prevention and control as well as future hospital management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese imports replace locally manufactured products in developing countries. The import of consumer goods from China to West Africa is closely linked to commercial travel, and China's border restrictions during the Covid outbreak put a near-halt to such travelling. Furthermore, the pandemic caused a global logistics crisis that disrupted supply chains with production in China. This paper asks whether Ghanaian manufacturers and artisanal producers could take advantage of these disruptions to enhance their competitive position. Did China's border closure provide space for local Ghanaian producers to thrive? We address this question by drawing on data collected among Ghanaian plastic manufacturers and furniture makers, who have faced tough competition from Chinese imports. Our analysis shows that supply chain disruptions from China led to the substitution of certain products previously imported from China, and these effects were partially sustained after the Covid-induced barriers to imports from China were removed. However, the disruptions were also costly for many Ghanaian producers, as they depended on Chinese intermediary products, tools, and other inputs. This illustrates how economic lives in Ghana and China have become so profoundly intertwined that indiscriminate decoupling is neither possible nor desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Human communities suffered a vast socioeconomic burden in dealing with the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) globally. Real-word data about these burdens can inform governments about evidence-based resource allocation and prioritization. The aim of this scoping review was to map the cost-of-illness (CoI) studies associated with COVID-19. Methods: This scoping review was conducted from January 2019 to December 2021. We searched cost-of-illness papers published in English within Web of Sciences, PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, Science Direct and ProQuest. For each eligible study, extracted data included country, publication year, study period, study design, epidemiological approach, costing method, cost type, cost identification, sensitivity analysis, estimated unit cost and national burden. All of the analyses were applied in Excel software. Results: 2352 records were found after the search strategy application, finally 28 articles met the inclusion criteria and were included in the review. Most of the studies were done in the United States, Turkey, and China. The prevalence-based approach was the most common in the studies, and most of studies also used Hospital Information System data (HIS). There were noticeable differences in the costing methods and the cost identification. The average cost of hospitalization per patient per day ranged from 101$ in Turkey to 2,364$ in the United States. Among the studies, 82.1% estimated particularly direct medical costs, 3.6% only indirect costs, and 14.3% both direct and indirect costs. Conclusion: The economic burden of COVID-19 varies from country to country. The majority of CoI studies estimated direct medical costs associated with COVID-19 and there is a paucity of evidence for direct non-medical, indirect, and intangible costs, which we recommend for future studies. To create homogeneity in CoI studies, we suggest researchers follow a conceptual framework and critical appraisal checklist of cost-of-illness (CoI) studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the policy package pilot implemented in Hubei Province, China, in April 2020 as a natural experiment, we use the synthetic control (SC) and synthetic difference in differences (SDID) methods to estimate the impact of the Chinese government's support policy on the economic resilience and to analyze the mechanisms by which it impacts. This study finds that the policy package has contributed to the growth of economic resilience in the pilot provinces, with the policy package increasing the average economic resilience of the pilot provinces by 0.062 compared to their potential resilience. The validity and robustness of the above conclusions are objectively confirmed by multidimensional quantitative outcomes such as placebo tests, ranking tests, and replacements in calculating resilience. The mechanism analysis shows that the investment in real estate development, the stimulus for consumption, and the core industry development are virtual channels for the policy package to promote economic resilience growth in the pilot provinces. Moreover, traditional investment in transportation fixed assets plays a minor role. This paper quantitatively corroborates the academic idea that government governance capacity affects regional economic resilience (RER), and research can provide empirical support for regional economic recovery and policy support under a major crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been ongoing for more than three years and urgently needs to be addressed. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions have played an important role in the clinical treatment of patients with COVID-19 in China. However, it is difficult to uncover the potential molecular mechanisms of the active ingredients in these TCM prescriptions. In this paper, we developed a new approach by integrating the experimental assay, virtual screening, and the experimental verification, exploring the rapid discovery of active ingredients from TCM prescriptions. To achieve this goal, 4 TCM prescriptions in clinical use for different indications were selected to find the antiviral active ingredients in TCMs. The 3-chymotrypsin-like protease (3CLpro), an important target for fighting COVID-19, was utilized to determine the inhibitory activity of the TCM prescriptions and single herb. It was found that 10 single herbs had better inhibitory activity than other herbs by using a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) - based enzymatic assay of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro. The ingredients contained in 10 herbs were thus virtually screened and the predicted active ingredients were experimentally validated. Thus, such a research strategy firstly removed many single herbs with no inhibitory activity against SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro at the very beginning by FRET-based assay, making our subsequent virtual screening more effective. Finally, 4 active components were found to have stronger inhibitory effects on SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro, and their inhibitory mechanism was subsequently investigated. Among of them, methyl rosmarinate as an allosteric inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro was confirmed and its ability to inhibit viral replication was demonstrated by the SARS-CoV-2 replicon system. To validate the binding mode via docking, the mutation experiment, circular dichroism (CD), enzymatic inhibition and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) assay were performed, demonstrating that methyl rosmarinate bound to the allosteric site of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro. In conclusion, this paper provides the new ideas for the rapid discovery of active ingredients in TCM prescriptions based on a specific target, and methyl rosmarinate has the potential to be developed as an antiviral therapeutic candidate against SARS-CoV-2 infection. • This paper explores the rapid discovery of the active ingredients from TCMs. • TCM prescriptions were selected to find anti-SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro active ingredients. • Methyl rosmarinate is an allosteric inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact investing literature largely focuses on private equity investing and overlooks the investments made through debt financing that actually dominate the market. To address this research gap, this paper investigates whether impact financing is associated with financial benefits. By using COVID-19 as an exogenous shock to China's stock market, this paper applies fixed effects panel data analysis with a difference-in-differences research design to provide robust empirical outcomes. The results reveal those financial institutions that better integrated environmental impacts into their financing process experienced positive stock return changes in response to the shock. This study answers the question of how well an impact scales. The findings suggest that impact financing is an effective model, as the impacts incorporated in the debt can be scaled up compared to impact investing funds with low volumes. Impact financing has enormous potential for financial institutions to engage in the green transition since they can derive pecuniary utility while delivering environmental impacts. The revelation of financial benefits also contributes to overcoming the lack of knowledge about impact financing and helps to remove the barriers that advance industry growth. • This paper studies whether impact financing is associated with financial benefits. • Financial firms that better integrate environmental impact in financing have positive stock return changes during COVID-19. • Financial firms can derive pecuniary utility from pursuing impact financing. • The findings suggest that impact financing can be an effective model to bring impact to a substantial scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 can be considered as the largest public health incident since 2019, posing disturbances to the medical, economic, and social systems. Understanding different levels of city resilience to the impact of COVID-19 on sustainable urban development is therefore essential. In this paper, we analyzed the evolution of the pandemic, the recovery of urban activities and major drivers of urban resilience to COVID-19 based on urban activity patterns derived from NO 2 monitoring stations from 217 cities in China. It is observed that nearly all urban activities have been affected by the epidemic with a reduced NO 2 emission, indicating a significant decline in the intensity of urban activity. The recovery patterns of human activity among different cities show that: (1) northern cities where low-resilience cities agglomerated have been severely affected. As of April 31, 2020, 12 northern cities have not recovered to pre-epidemic levels; (2) about three-quarters of the cities went through multiple stages to return to the pre-pandemic level, which related to both pandemic stress and prevention measures; (3) about 46.04% of the cities experienced increasing activity patterns that exceeded the pre-epidemic activity level. It is also observed that urban resilience can behave quite differently driven by variations in green coverage, economic aggregate, employment security, and medical system. Our study highlights the potential of an elevated urban resilience by optimizing the urban layout, improving the quantity and quality of green space, and enhancing the medical system. [Display omitted] • Most of the southern cities of China show higher urban activity than pre-pandemic. • Low/high-resilient urban agglomerations located in the north-northeast/south China. • Most cities undergo two stages of recovery at the beginning and end of March 2020. • Urban greenery is positively correlated to urban resilience. • Hospital capacity, instead of number, is more crucial to urban resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the mortality impacts of ozone pollution in China and the moderating effects of two possible adaptation strategies. Using an instrument variable constructed from ozone concentrations of nearby upwind cities, we find that ozone pollution significantly increases all-cause, cardiovascular, and respiratory mortality. Healthcare service provision significantly decreases the impacts of ozone pollution on all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, but does not moderate the impact on respiratory mortality. The impact of ozone on RES mortality declines after COVID-19. Healthcare service provision also reduces the distributional impact of ozone across the elderly and younger groups. Projection shows that climate change would induce mortality costs of 0.08% of China's GDP through increasing ozone pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a new risk evaluation index system for overseas energy investment, while considering the country's response ability to major risk events using COVID-19 as experience. The entropy weight method and the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) method are used to conduct overall and sub-dimensional risk assessment for 52 countries. The results show that: (1) among the seven risk dimensions considered, the response ability to major risk events dimension has the highest weight, accounting for 16.47 %. This indicates that Chinese energy corporations cannot ignore the risk posed by major risk events, such as COVID-19, in their overseas investments. (2) Among the 52 countries investigated, investment risk is significantly lower in developed countries than in developing countries, mainly because of the better performance of the former across the four dimensions of economics foundation, governing ability, social development, and investment environment. (3) The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the landscape of China's overseas energy investment risk. Due to the different performance of each country in other dimensions, the risk rankings of the majority of developing countries decreased when considering their COVID-19 response, while that of most developed countries increased. • Assesses the risk of China's overseas energy investments. • An overseas energy investment risk evaluation system considering the response ability to major risk events is constructed. • The response ability to major risk events impacts the landscape of China's overseas energy investment risk. • Investment risk is lower in developed countries than in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the new coronavirus COVID-19 has brought great disaster and loss to the world and is still spreading around the world. The situation in China is generally well controlled, and the lockdown has been removed, but the comments and messages about the epidemic persist online. For people working and living normally in China, their attitudes and views toward COVID-19 directly reflect the current situation of the pandemic. This paper collected Chinese microblogs, forums, and online comments, identified the latest comments about COVID-19, and conducted a sentiment analysis of them. Specifically, we proposed a new sentiment analysis method that integrated the semantics of words with the text analyzed. Different from the traditional sentiment analysis method which only relied on sentiment words, the proposed method extended the semantic concepts of affective words by integrating the semantic conceptual information about the affective words from the context of the comments and thus, provided information to support the final judgment of the affective opinions. The proposed approach incorporated the part-of-speech embedding information along with word embedding and relies on semantic concepts to enhance the emotional expression of words in context. The experimental results showed that by integrating the semantics of words, the accuracy of sentiment analysis is substantially improved, and it also reflected that different semantics of the same word have different influences on sentiment analysis. On several benchmark datasets, there was a 3–6% improvement in accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A user persona oriented toward the enterprise is constructed to characterize power consumption in the context of COVID-19. • Abstract labels are extracted from enterprise power profiles based on industrial, regional, periodic power profiles. • Enterprises with similar electricity consumption characteristics or the same label are grouped to allow recommendations for customized electricity products, policy, and services. The COVID-19 epidemic has led to devastating consequences worldwide due to strict social distancing measures, travel bans, city lockdowns, and other activity restrictions. Numerous lessons have been accumulated by various industries or sectors in the process of coping with COVID-19. In our paper, the actual electricity consumption of 1.145 million enterprises in a province of China is investigated in the normal period, the breakout period, and the recovery period. An artificial intelligence based enterprise profiling model is established to characterize power consumption profile geographically, temporally, and industrially. The recovery rate of enterprise power consumption is proposed as a key indicator representing the status of production resumption. Under lockdown measures, enterprise in different regions or sectors exhibits diversified responses in power consumption, the unsupervised learning model and the correlated coefficient extract the abstract characteristics and labels from various enterprise power profile. Ultimately, enterprises with similar electricity consumption characteristics are grouped and labeled to provide customized power services. Accurate enterprise profiling can effectively aid in facing with the challenges of insufficient orders, tight capital chains, and rising costs caused by the epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 spread very quickly around the world following its discovery in China, in December 2019. Lockdowns implemented in China and the Global North to control the propagation of the virus and to save human lives have resulted in a global recession. The transmission of the recessionary effects from the Global North to the Global South is reflected in the decline in sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) GDP and the associated increase in poverty. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the recession induced in China and the Global North by COVID-19 lockdowns may have had indirect effects on SSA mortality that are higher than those directly attributed to the pandemic itself. Our methodology relies on a three-step relationship: (i) the impact of lockdowns on the recession in the North, (ii) the impact of the recession in the North on income in SSA countries, and (iii) the impact of a decline in income on mortality in SSA. We show that COVID-19-induced lockdowns in the Global North, through the severe recessions they induced in the Global South, resulted in the transfer of between 538,000 and 679,000 deaths in one year to SSA, including the deaths of 140,000 to 177,000 children aged 0–5 years. This corresponds to a 6–7% increase in the crude death rate and a 5–6% increase in under-5 mortality. These figures are much higher than the number of deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 in SSA. Thus, policymakers must not lose sight of the indirect excess mortality caused by global economic recession triggered by the pandemic. Our results reveal the need to increase the resilience of SSA countries to exogenous shocks, including COVID-19, which, in addition to increasing poverty, may induce excessive mortality due to the high sensitivity of mortality in SSA countries to economic recession. • Theoretical model of COVID-19 deaths transfer from the Global North to the Global South. • Lockdowns in the Global North generated recession in the Global North. • Spillover effects of the recession from the Global North to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). • Focus on the impact of income declines on mortality in SSA. • The indirect mortality through recessions in SSA would be higher than the direct mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The travel restriction leads to the enormous economic loss to the tourism industry. In this paper, the economic loss and the environmental gains (e.g., water and energy resources) from COVID-19 impact on China's tourism industry are estimated based on environmentally extended multiple regional input-output model. Results indicate that the China's tourism consumption loss triggered 921 billion US$ output loss via supply chain in 2020, which account for 7 % of GDP in 2019. Additionally, the economic loss further ripples tourism water footprint conservation of 10 billion m3 (equal to the annual water consumption of Poland) and tourism energy footprint conservation of 116 million tce (equal to the annual energy consumption of Australia). Findings reveal that regions with large tourism economic losses are not completely consistent with the regions with significant relief of water and energy pressures. Water pressure in Xinjiang (Northwest) and energy pressure in Hainan (South) have been alleviated due to reduced tourism consumption along the Southeast coast. These knock-on effects highlight a deeper internal link between the economy and the environment. The development of tourism in the post-COVID-19 era needs to reduce the direct water and energy footprint of local area by applying advanced water-saving and energy-saving technologies. • China's tourism output loss caused by COVID-19 accounts for 7 % of GDP in 2019. • 10 billion m3 of water saving equals to the annual water consumption of Poland. • 116 million tce of energy saving equals to the annual energy consumption of Australia. • Tourism activities decreasing in East relieve great water use stress in Northwest China. • Decreasing tourism demand in Southeast mitigates energy use stress in South China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]