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Background: A worldwide vaccination program is the chosen strategy against the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy however, forms a threat because vaccine uptake is voluntary in most countries. Care-professionals of people with intellectual disabilities are exposed to greater risks than other healthcare workers due to the vulnerable group they attend to and the assisted-living facilities in which they often work. Little is still known of the reasons for vaccine hesitancy in this specific group in contrast to those of other healthcare workers. Objective: To provide insight in the intentions and attitudes on COVID-vaccination of healthcare workers, including those who care for people with intellectual disabilities, by means of a scoping review. Methods: The databases that were searched for papers are CINAHL, APA PsycArticles, APA PsycInfo, Web of Science, Semantic Scolar, Prospero, Outbreak Science, Cochrane and Scopus. The search was broadened to healthcare workers in general because only two papers were found on those caring for people with intellectual disabilities. A total of 26 papers were identified concerning the vaccine intentions of 43,199 healthcare workers worldwide. Data were gathered both quantitively and qualitatively. The papers were analysed for all themes regarding vaccine willingness and vaccine hesitancy. Results: The themes that came to light included: percentages of vaccine willingness, predictors of willingness differentiated by 11 sub-themes (mainly profession, age, gender and past vaccine behaviour), attitudes of willingness and hesitancy differentiated by 19 sub-themes (perceived COVID treat and protecting others for willingness, concerns on vaccine safety and efficacy for hesitancy), sources of vaccination information, contextual factors and changes in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance over time and finally, future strategies for interventions. Conclusions: There was overlap in the percentages of vaccination, predictors of vaccine willingness and the attitudes of vaccine willingness and hesitancy between healthcare workers and those caring for people with intellectual disabilities. Vaccine safety and efficacy are the most prominent concerns with regard to vaccine hesitancy. Therefore, future strategies for interventions should address vaccine safety and efficacy. Furthermore, interventions are recommended to be interactive in order to facilitate exchange. Discussion groups that are able to address specific concerns and personal experiences, show to be effective in addressing vaccine hesitancy. Accurate information can also be made more accessible to target groups by promoting video’s on social media platforms. Hence, further research is necessary to specify more precisely the attitudes of healthcare workers caring for people with intellectual disabilities and in more countries worldwide.

L'intervento affronta il tema centrale del diritto del lavoro ovvero la subordinazione alla luce dei mutamenti dei tipi di lavoro dettati da un nuovo modo di domandare lavoro e di prestarlo, e tanto specie a seguito delle esigenze connesse alla pandemia da Covid-19.

L'intervento programmato è volto ad analizzare la politica messa in atto dalla Commissione europea nel contesto della crisi seguita alla pandemia di Covid-19 in materia di concentrazioni tra imprese.

Persistent ill health after acute COVID-19—referred to as long COVID, the post-acute COVID-19 syndrome, or the post-COVID-19 condition—has emerged as a major concern. We undertook an international consensus exercise to identify research priorities with the aim of understanding the long-term effects of acute COVID-19, with a focus on people with pre-existing airways disease and the occurrence of new-onset airways disease and associated symptoms. 202 international experts were invited to submit a minimum of three research ideas. After a two-phase internal review process, a final list of 98 research topics was scored by 48 experts. Patients with pre-existing or post-COVID-19 airways disease contributed to the exercise by weighting selected criteria. The highest-ranked research idea focused on investigation of the relationship between prognostic scores at hospital admission and morbidity at 3 months and 12 months after hospital discharge in patients with and without pre-existing airways disease. High priority was also assigned to comparisons of the prevalence and severity of post-COVID-19 fatigue, sarcopenia, anxiety, depression, and risk of future cardiovascular complications in patients with and without pre-existing airways disease. Our approach has enabled development of a set of priorities that could inform future research studies and funding decisions. This prioritisation process could also be adapted to other, non-respiratory aspects of long COVID.

La convenzione ONU per i diritti delle persone con disabilità (CRPD 2006) innova l’attuale tecnica legislativa definendo il fenomeno della disabilità secondo un’ottica non clinico-medica ma bio-psico-sociale e relazionale. La disabilità viene fotografata come “risultato dell’interazione tra persone con menomazioni e barriere comportamentali ed ambientali”. Una delle cause inabilitanti maggiori è rappresentata dal dolore cronico: sono in corso di elaborazione ricerche volte a raccogliere dati clinici per l’ideazione di algoritmi predittivi in grado di coadiuvare l’autonomia del medico nella scelta della terapia per determinate categorie di pazienti. Tenendo conto di queste premesse, la nostra ricerca si concentra sulla possibilità di rendere effettivo il diritto del paziente disabile ad una “vita indipendente”, secondo l’Art. 19 CRPD che riconosce il diritto del disabile a scegliere l’abitazione e il luogo di lavoro, introducendo una riforma sistemica di portata pari a quella della legge Basaglia. Questo progetto, che adotta un approccio clinico legale, sarà sviluppato seguendo due assi di ricerca. Il primo mira ad analizzare: a) lo stato dei diritti delle persone con disabilità, tramite una mappatura casistica, individuando i disagi emersi in particolare durante l’isolamento pandemico; b) le problematiche giuridiche concernenti l’estensione di modelli predittivi pensati per persone normodotate ai pazienti disabili, tenendo conto delle specificità di questi ultimi. Il secondo asse di ricerca interdisciplinare, centrato sull’informatica giuridica e la robotica sociale, adotta, da un lato, un approccio relazionale che integra l’uso della robotica nel rapporto con il disabile; dall’altro, muovendo dall’analisi di casi precedentemente individuati e dall’identificazione di soluzioni di problemi, misurabili quantitativamente, attraverso la logica predittiva propria dell’Intelligenza artificiale, si concentra sulle trasformazioni della soggettività giuridica (capacità, amministrazione di sostegno) e sull’attribuzione di funzioni ad enti artificiali. In tal modo, il progetto intende favorire l’inclusione sociale dei disabili -resa ancor più problematica dall’emergenza Covid 19- attraverso l'introduzione di nuovi paradigmi giuridici sperimentabili su casi concreti e la creazione di nuove figure professionali formate all’uso delle tecnologie abilitanti.

A global cross-discipline effort is ongoing to characterize the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 virus and generate reliable epidemiological models of its diffusion. To this end, phylogenomic approaches leverage accumulating genomic mutations as barcodes to track the evolutionary history of the virus and can benefit from the surge of sequences deposited in public databases. Yet, such methods typically rely on consensus sequences representing the dominant virus lineage, whereas a complex sublineage architecture is often observed within single hosts. Furthermore, most approaches do not account for variants accumulation processes and might produce inaccurate results in condition of limited sampling, as witnessed in most countries currently affected by the epidemics. We here introduce a new framework for the characterization of viral (sub)lineage evolution and transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which considers both clonal and intra-host minor variants and exploits the achievements of cancer evolution research to account for mutation accumulation and uncertainty in the data. The application of our approach to 18 SARS-CoV-2 samples for which raw sequencing data are available reveals a high-resolution phylogenomic model, which confirms and improves recent findings on viral types and highlights the existence of patterns of co-occurrence of minor variants, uncovering likely infection paths among hosts harboring the same viral lineage. Our findings confirm a significant increase of genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in time, which is reflected in minor variants, and show that standard methods may struggle when handling datasets with important sampling limitations. Importantly, our framework allows to pinpoint minor variants that might be positively selected across distinct lineages and regions of the viral genome under purifying selection, thus driving the design of treatments and vaccines. In particular, minor variant g.29039A>U, detected in multiple viral lineages and validated on an independent dataset, shows that SARS-CoV-2 can lose its main Nucleocapsid immunogenic epitopes, raising concerns about the effectiveness of vaccines targeting the C-terminus of this protein. To conclude, we advocate the use of our framework in combination with data-driven epidemiological models, to deliver a high-precision platform for pathogen detection, surveillance and analysis.

Sebbene alle società occidentali sia associata l’idea di condizioni di vita più sicure, emerge un vero paradosso causa la maggiore sensibilità al rischio che si rileva. Il concetto stesso di progresso è posto in discussione: la scienza è ritenuta indispensabile nella scoperta dei nuovi fattori di rischio ma, contemporaneamente, dimostra dei limiti al contenimento di altri. Anche la tecnologia, quale variabile prioritaria per la mitigazione del rischio, è associata costantemente a significati ambivalenti, in termini sia di benefici che di pericoli. Inoltre, la valutazione del rischio – il cui impiego si lega sistematicamente alla costruzione di modelli previsionali per la “cura di sé” – rievoca una serie di fattori ambientali, economici e familiari. In questo contesto, l’interesse scientifico si scontra con una realtà in cui l’equilibrio tra il “fare troppo” – con il rischio di derive di sicurezza sanitaria – e il “non fare nulla” – che richiede un lavoro di spiegazione e di rassicurazione – risulta mutevole e sensibile alle vicende del momento. La pandemia da Covid 19 ha dimostrato le notevoli difficoltà, da parte dei Governi, di rispondere prontamente all’emergenza sanitaria e, al contempo, di placare il senso di incertezza insidiatosi nella mente degli individui.

This repository contains the Python and R codes used for the paper titled: Uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis of COVID-19 exit strategies in an individual-based transmission model.