To ascertain patient acceptance of immediate sequential bilateral cataract surgery (ISBCS) in the National Health Service (NHS).
 
  A survey was devised using a 5-point Likert scale for questions related to ISBCS, which patients undertook during their cataract outpatient appointment pre-COVID-19 lockdown and by telephone during the lockdown.
 
  Questionnaires were completed for 267 patients. Most respondents were aged over 71 (51%) and were female individuals (60%). Forty-five per cent agreed/strongly agreed with opting for ISBCS. A positive correlation was identified between opting for ISBCS and convenience to the patient (
  =0.76, p<0.01) and family/carer/partner (
  =0.71, p<0.01) and wanting to limit numbers of hospital visits (r=0.57, p<0.01). Fifty per cent agreed/strongly agreed that they were worried about the risk of simultaneous bilateral ocular complications, with this correlating with being less likely to opt for ISBCS (
  =-0.49, p<0.01) and being scared of ISBCS (
  =0.67, p<0.01). Duch concerns need addressing. Some attitudes did appear to change during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The familiarity of the concept of ISBCS is low suggesting the need for patient education.Many infectious diseases such as coronavirus disease 2019 spread through preexisting social networks. Although network models consider the implications of micro-level interaction patterns for disease transmission, epidemiologists and social scientists know little about the meso-structure of disease transmission. Meso-structure refers to the pattern of disease spread at a higher level of aggregation, that is, among infection clusters corresponding to organizations, locales, and events. The authors visualizes this meso-structure using publicly available contact tracing data from Singapore. Visualization shows that one highly central infection cluster appears to have generated on the order of seven or eight infection chains, amounting to 60 percent of nonimported cases during the period considered. However, no other cluster generated more than two infection chains. This heterogeneity suggests that network meso-structure is highly consequential for epidemic dynamics.The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruptions to education in the United States, with a large proportion of schooling moving to online formats, which has the potential to exacerbate existing racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in learning. The authors visualize access to online learning technologies using data from the Household Pulse Survey from the early fall 2020 school period (August 19 to October 26). The authors find that 10.1 percent of children participating in online learning nationally did not have adequate access to the Internet and a computer. Rates of inadequate access varied nearly 20-fold across the gradient of parental race/ethnicity and education, from 1.9 percent for children of Asian parents with graduate degrees to 35.5 percent among children of Black parents with less than a high school education. These findings indicate alarming gaps in potential learning among U.S. children. Renewed investments in equitable access to distance-learning resources will be necessary to prevent widening racial/ethnic and class learning disparities.Previous studies have established that firm size is associated with a wage premium, but the wage premium has declined in recent decades. The authors examine the risk for unemployment by firm size during the initial outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 in the United States. Using both yearly and state-month variation, the authors find greater excess unemployment among workers in small enterprises than among those in larger firms. The gaps cannot be entirely attributed to the sorting of workers or to industrial context. The firm size advantage is most pronounced in sectors with high remotability but reverses in the sectors most affected by the pandemic. Overall, these findings suggest that firm size is linked to greater job security and that the pandemic may have accelerated prior trends regarding product and labor market concentration. They also point out that the initial policy responses did not provide sufficient protection for workers in small and medium-sized businesses.A large body of sociological research has shown that racial minorities and women experience significant disadvantages in the labor market. In this visualization, the author presents evidence from the Current Population Survey examining the effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 crisis on racial and gender inequalities in employment in the United States among prime-age workers. The author shows that the white-nonwhite gap in employment increased significantly during the post-outbreak period. Results from individual fixed-effects regression models show a strong white male advantage in the likelihood of being laid off for post-outbreak months compared with women, black men, Hispanic men, and Asian men.When coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a major impediment to face-to-face college instruction in spring 2020, most teaching went online. Over the summer, colleges had to make difficult decisions about whether to return to in-person instruction. Although opening campuses could pose a major health risk, keeping instruction online could dissuade students from enrolling. Taking an ecological approach, the authors use mixed modeling techniques and data from 87 percent of two- and four-year public and four-year private U.S. colleges to assess the factors that shaped decisions about fall 2020 instructional modality. Most notably, the authors find that reopening decisions about whether to return to in-person instruction were unrelated to cumulative COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. Politics and budget concerns played the most important roles. Colleges that derived more of their revenue from tuition were more likely to return to classroom instruction, as were institutions in states and counties that supported Donald Trump for president in 2016.Exercising is crucial to keeping up physical and mental health during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In this visualization, the authors consider how existing social inequalities may create unequal physical exercise patterns during COVID-19 in the United States. Analyzing data from a nationally representative Internet panel of the University of Southern California Center for Economic and Social Research Understanding Coronavirus in America project (March to December), the authors find that although all Americans have become physically more active since the outbreak, the pandemic has also exacerbated the inequality in physical exercise.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/proxalutamide-gt0918.html  Specifically, the authors show that the gaps in physical exercise have widened substantially between men and women, whites and nonwhites, the rich and the poor, and the educated and the less educated. Policy interventions addressing the widening inequality in physical activity can help minimize the disproportionate mental health impact of the pandemic on disadvantaged populations.