HONG KONG Reuters) - Zhang Meng had a breakdown last December. The 20-year-old found herself sobbing on the stairs of her dorm, driven to despair by repeated COVID lockdowns of her university campus in Beijing. The lockdowns had meant she was mostly confined to her room and unable to meet up with friends. There were also strict curbs on when she could visit the canteen or take a shower. Describing herself as someone who craves in-person social interaction, Zhang said the restrictions had "removed the safety net that was holding me up and I felt like my whole being was falling down".

They reviewed 11 databases that were searched from inception to Sep-tember 2020, and machine learning was applied for screening articles.

How to Unplug from the World-Gobbling Machine One year ago, on March 19, 2020, I took a walk in my neighborhood park, seeking to clear my mind. The governor had declared a state of emergency 11 days ago in response to the WHO's pronouncement of a global coronavirus pandemic. In the week that followed, I voluntarily transferred my counseling practice to video-only sessions, doing my part to participate in the "two weeks to flatten the curve" campaign that had spread virally via social media and other means of internet delivery. After all, "We're all in this together," I thought. But during my first week of teletherapy sessions, a new, involuntary form of curve-flattening had begun to sweep the country, starting in the California Bay Area, in imitation of the Chinese and Italian lockdowns. Earlier that day the California Governor had extended this lockdown to cover the entire state by executive decree. It seemed only a matter of time before the Oregon Governor would follow suit (she did ...

Plexiglass and human "traffic monitors" will go only so far to ease concerns of both consumers and employees about in-person banking while the COVID pandemic continues. Financial institutions are realizing that long-term adjustments will be required in how retail banking is conducted. This dramatic shift has sharply increased interest in various types of conversational banking, especially as a means to ease the pressure on call centers. Most often, conversational banking takes the form of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence. But it also includes voice-activated digital assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, used with a variety of devices including mobile phones and smart speakers.