In the United States, non-Hispanic Black (NHB), Hispanic, and non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native (NHAIAN) populations experience excess COVID-19 mortality, compared to the non-Hispanic White (NHW) population, but racial/ethnic differences in age at death are not known. The release of national COVID-19 death data by racial/ethnic group now permits analysis of age-specific mortality rates for these groups and the non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander (NHAPI) population. read more Our objectives were to examine variation in age-specific COVID-19 mortality rates by racial/ethnicity and to calculate the impact of this mortality using years of potential life lost (YPLL).

This cross-sectional study used the recently publicly available data on US COVID-19 deaths with reported race/ethnicity, for the time period February 1, 2020, to July 22, 2020. Population data were drawn from the US Census. As of July 22, 2020, the number of COVID-19 deaths equaled 68,377 for NHW, 29,476 for NHB, 23,256 for Hispanic, 1,143 for Nge strata. To avoid overlooking such variation, data that permit age-specific analyses should be routinely publicly available.

In this study, we observed racial variation in age-specific mortality rates not fully captured with examination of age-standardized rates alone. These findings suggest the importance of examining age-specific mortality rates and underscores how age standardization can obscure extreme variations within age strata. To avoid overlooking such variation, data that permit age-specific analyses should be routinely publicly available.

To describe the extent to which local guidelines for admission to UK midwifery units align with national guidance; to describe variation in individual admission criteria; and to describe the extent to which alongside midwifery units (AMUs) are the default option for eligible women.

National cross-sectional survey.

All 122 UK maternity services with midwifery units, between October 2018 and February 2019.

Alignment of local admission guidelines with national guidance (NICE CG190); frequency and nature of variation in individual admission criteria; percentage of services with AMU as default birth setting for eligible women.

Admission guidelines were received from 87 maternity services (71%), representing 153 units, and we analysed 85 individual guideline documents. Overall, 92% of local admission guidelines varied from national guidance; 76% contained both some admission criteria that were ‘more inclusive’ and some that were ‘more restrictive’ than national guidance. The most common ‘more inclusive’ a local midwifery unit admission criteria found in this study represents a potentially confusing and inequitable basis for women making choices about planned place of birth. A review of national guidance may be indicated and where a lack of relevant evidence underlies variation in admission criteria, further research by planned place of birth is required.Coral bleaching driven by ocean warming is one of the most visible ecological impacts of climate change and perhaps the greatest threat to the persistence of reefs in the coming decades. In the absence of returning atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to those compatible with ocean temperatures below the mass coral bleaching temperature thresholds, the most straightforward means to reduce thermal-stress induced bleaching is to cool water at the seabed. The feasibility of reducing the seabed temperature through cool-water injections is considered first by analysing the feasibility of doing so on 19 reefs with differing physical environments using a simple residence time metric in 200 m resolution hydrodynamic model configurations. We then concentrate on the reefs around Lizard Island, the most promising candidate of the 19 locations, and develop a 40 m hydrodynamic model to investigate the effect of the injection of cool water at differing volumetric rates. Injecting 27°C seawater at a rate of 5 m3 s-1 at 4 sites in early 2017 cooled 97 ha of the reef by 0.15°C or more. The power required to pump 5 m3 s-1 through a set of pipes over a distance of 3 km from a nearby channel is ∼466 kW. This power applied at 4 sites for 3 months achieves a 2 Degree Heating Weeks (DHWs) reduction on 97 ha of reef. A more precise energy costing will require further expert engineering design of the pumping equipment and energy sources. Even for the most physically favourable reefs, cool-water transported through pipes and injected at a reef site is energy expensive and cannot be scaled up to any meaningful fraction of the 3,100 reefs of the GBR. Should priority be given to reducing thermal stress on one or a few high value reefs, this paper provides a framework to identify the most promising sites.Over the past two decades, researchers have discovered a special form of alternative splicing that produces a circular form of RNA. Although these circular RNAs (circRNAs) have garnered considerable attention in the scientific community for their biogenesis and functions, the focus of current studies has been on the tissue-specific circRNAs that exist only in one tissue but not in other tissues or on the disease-specific circRNAs that exist in certain disease conditions, such as cancer, but not under normal conditions. This approach was conducted in the relative absence of methods that analyze a group of common circRNAs that exist in both conditions, but are more abundant in one condition relative to another (differentially expressed). Studies of differentially expressed circRNAs (DECs) between two conditions would serve as a significant first step in filling this void. Here, we introduce a novel computational tool, seekCRIT (seek for differentially expressed CircRNAs In Transcriptome), that identifies the DECs between two conditions from high-throughput sequencing data. Using rat retina RNA-seq data from ischemic and normal conditions, we show that over 74% of identifiable circRNAs are expressed in both conditions and over 40 circRNAs are differentially expressed between two conditions. We also obtain a high qPCR validation rate of 90% for DECs with a FDR of less then 5%. Our results demonstrate that seekCRIT is a novel and efficient approach to detect DECs using rRNA depleted RNA-seq data. seekCRIT is freely downloadable at https//github.com/UofLBioinformatics/seekCRIT. The source code is licensed under the MIT License. seekCRIT is developed and tested on Linux CentOS-7.