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April 29, 2020
American Geriatrics Society (AGS) Policy Brief: COVID-19 and Assisted Living Facilities
This policy brief sets forth the American Geriatrics Society’s (AGS’s) recommendations to guide federal, state, and local governments when making decisions about care for older adults in assisted living facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. It outlines need for PPE, access to testing, public health support for infection control, and workforce training. This brief is based…
Extensions of the SEIR Model for the Analysis of Tailored Social Distancing and Tracing Approaches to Cope with COVID-19
Grimm et al propose an extension of the SEIR model to enable analysis of commonly used measures of epidemic control. The model allows for different infectiousness parameters within and across groups, different asymptomatic, hospitalization, and lethality rates, as well as different take-up rates of tracing apps. It analyzes the interplay of group-specific protection with a…
Real-time time-series modelling for prediction of COVID-19 spread and intervention assessment
Rashidi et al introduce a unified platform which integrates visualization capabilities with advanced statistical methods for predicting the virus spread in the short run, using real-time data. The platform is backed up by advanced time series models to capture any possible non-linearity in the data which is enhanced by the capability of measuring the expected…
The impact of the COVID19 pandemic and initial period of lockdown on the mental health and wellbeing of UK adults
White and Boor assess the mental health and wellbeing impacts of COVID19 in 600 adults during the initial phase of the lockdown in the UK using an online survey that included COVID19-related questions, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the WHO-5, and the OXCAP-MH. Self-isolating prior to lockdown, increased feelings of isolation, and having COVID19-related…
Long-term Coexistence of SARS-CoV-2 with Antibody Response in COVID-19 Patients
Wang et investigated whether antibodies are important for the adaptive immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 infection in 26 COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms in Jinan, China. They report of a subset of patients with both SRAS-CoV-2 and virus-specific IgG coexisting for an unexpectedly long time, with two cases for up to 50 days. One COVID-19 patient…
The values of coagulation function in COVID-19 patients
Jin et al retrospectively investigate blood coagulation function in 147 COVID-19 patients, and the correlation between coagulopathy and disease severity in Wuhan Hospital. Patients with thrombotic disease had a higher case-fatality and were also associated with disease severity. T-PA/PAI-1 Complex and D-Dimer were independent risk factors and predictors for death in patients. The coagulation systems…
Cancer patients and research during COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review of current evidence
This review paper addresses the challenges of cancer management in the era of SARS-CoV-2. It discusses the epidemiological, clinical, pathological and radiological characteristics of the disease in cancer patients and its outcomes on this population. The authors focus on strategies that are followed in cancer management with review of national and international guidelines. Moujaess et…
Role of Drugs Affecting the Renin-Angiotensin-Aldosterone System on Susceptibility and Severity of COVID-19: A Large Case-Control Study from Zheijang Province, China
Medical editorials have suggested limited use of ACEI and ARBs in people with arterial hypertension during the COVID-19 pandemic because of increased risk of worse clinical outcomes and that calcium channel blockers (CCBs) should be used as an alternative. Using a cohort of 610 COVID-19 cases and 48,667 population-based controls from Zheijang, China, Yan et…
Explanable- by-design approach for COVID-19 classification via CT-scan
This paper presents a new eXplainable Deep Learning (XDL) approach to detect COVID-19 from CT. The authors suggest this new approach is more sensitive and the performance surpasses other state-of-the-art approaches such as the baseline Deep Neural Network approach. It produce highly interpretable results which may be helpful for the early detection of the disease…
First detection of SARS-COV-2 in untreated wastewaters in Italy
Several studies support use of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) to assess viruses circulating in a given community. Rosa et al tested twelve influent sewage samples from Wastewater Treatment Plants collected in high (Milan) and low (Rome) epidemic circulation in Italy, reporting that 6 out of 12 samples tested positive. This study further supports potential use of…
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