During the current COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation is a major challenge, raising several social and psychological concerns. This article highlights the prevailing misinformation as an outbreak containing hoaxes, myths, and rumours. In comparison to traditional media, online media platforms facilitate misinformation even more widely. To further affirm this ethical concern, the researchers cite relevant studies demonstrating the role of new media in misinformation and its potential consequences. Besides other significant psychosocial impacts, such as xenophobia, psychological distress, LGBT rights violation, gender-based violence, misinformation is undermining healthcare workers' psychological health and their efforts to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. In view of the adverse consequences of misinformation, this article addresses it as a massive ethical challenge during the current outbreak. Thus, the researchers make relevant suggestions to evaluate misinformation sources and mitigate the psychosocial impacts attributed to misinformation during crises. They include forming mental health teams comprising of psychologists, psychiatrists, and trained paramedical staff; rapid dissemination of authentic and updated COVID-19 situation reports regularly; establishing helpline services; and recognizing a broader range of personal needs. All health authorities should make clear that they are listening and responding to public concerns. Much effort is needed to counteract COVID-19 misinformation.

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In this study, we propose a new improved estimator of population mean for the sensitive variable in the presence of measurement error under simple and stratified random sampling. This estimator accounts the auxiliary information as well as the ranks of the auxiliary variable. From theoretical and numerical studies it is shown that a new improved estimator performs better than the existing estimators under study.

In the present paper we propose an improved class of estimators in the presence of measurement error and non-response under stratified random sampling for estimating the finite population mean. The theoretical and numerical studies reveal that the proposed class of estimators performs better than other existing estimators.

Sodium is an integral part of water, and its excessive amount in drinking water causes high blood pressure and hypertension. In the present paper, spatial distribution of sodium concentration in drinking water is modeled and optimized sampling designs for selecting sampling locations is calculated for three divisions in Punjab, Pakistan. Universal kriging and Bayesian universal kriging are used to predict the sodium concentrations. Spatial simulated annealing is used to generate optimized sampling designs. Different estimation methods (i.e., maximum likelihood, restricted maximum likelihood, ordinary least squares, and weighted least squares) are used to estimate the parameters of the variogram model (i.e, exponential, Gaussian, spherical and cubic). It is concluded that Bayesian universal kriging fits better than universal kriging. It is also observed that the universal kriging predictor provides minimum mean universal kriging variance for both adding and deleting locations during sampling design.

In survey sampling, information on auxiliary variables related to the main variable is often available in many practical problems. Since the mid-twentieth century, researchers have taken a keen interest in the use of auxiliary information, due to its usefulness in estimation methods. In this article, our main objective is to discover the problem associated with estimation of the finite population distribution function, using the known auxiliary variable, which occurs as the sample distribution function and the rank of the auxiliary variable. A new family of the finite population distribution function estimators is proposed in the stratified sampling scheme. The mathematical equations for the bias and mean square error have been obtained for each proposed estimator, along with the efficiency conditions. Besides theoretical efficiency comparison, an empirical study has also been conducted to analyze the performance of estimators. A simulation study is also performed to observe the efficiency of the proposed estimators. The implementation of the proposed sampling scheme is illustrated by a practical example.

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This article aims to suggest a new improved generalized class of estimators for finite population distribution function of the study and the auxiliary variables as well as mean of the usual auxiliary variable under simple random sampling. The numerical expressions for the bias and mean squared error (MSE) are derived up to first degree of approximation. From our generalized class of estimators, we obtained two improved estimators. The gain in second proposed estimator is more as compared to first estimator. Three real data sets and a simulation are accompanied to measure the performances of our generalized class of estimators. The MSE of our proposed estimators is minimum and consequently percentage relative efficiency is higher as compared to their existing counterparts. From the numerical outcomes it has been shown that the proposed estimators perform well as compared to all considered estimators in this study.