Modeling of a coronavirus disease outbreak at the beginning of 2021 in Shijiazhuang， Hebei Province， China / 上海预防医学

Objective:To model an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 （COVID-19） in Shijiazhuang and forecast its spread trend. Method:We collected confirmed COVID-19 cases from the Health Commission of Hebei Province during the period of January 2 to January 27， 2021. We built a new model （SEIaIcRK）， including the contribution of asymptomatic cases， based on the traditional SEIR model to explore and analyze the transmission of COVID-19. Results:A total of 863 confirmed cases were reported during the study period （ended on January 27， 2021）. Our model fitted well with the daily cumulative incidence data and showed that the effective reproductive number decreased sharply from 3.80 on January 2 to 1.54 on January 4， then further decreased to <1 afterwards. Our model also predicted that number of COVID-19 cases would not increase after Feb 16， 2021. Conclusion:The SEIaIcRK model can be used to predict the spread trend of COVID-19 in Shijiazhuang. The current COVID-19 countermeasures effectively contain the disease spread.

A prospective microbial surveillance project at a major Italian Hospital: Epidemiological perspectives, and in vitro susceptibility rates

Microbiological surveillance program is currently performed at our tertiary-care teaching Hospital. The temporal trend of microbial isolates from patients admitted during the last four calendar years (2004 to 2007), has been analyzed according to the main bacterial and fungal cultured organisms. The same pathogens isolated more than once from the same patient within one month, have been considered only once. On the whole, the main pathogen group remained that of Enterobacteriaceae (6,608 isolations out of 19,666: 33.6%, with Escherichia coli retrieved in 60-75% of cases), with no significant difference over time. Staphylococci (4,150 isolates), and enterococci (3,276 isolates), were the two largest groups after Enterobacteriaceae, but staphylococci significantly declined during the examined four-year period (p<.001), mainly due to a progressively reduced isolation of coagulase-negative staphylococci. On the other hand, a slight increase of enterococci occurred (p<.05). Based on the frequency of isolation, Gram-negative oxydasepositive organisms accounted for 2,109 episodes, followed by other aerobe Gram-positive organisms other than Staphylococci-Enterococci (613 isolates), and anaerobes (583 isolates): no significant temporal variations occurred over time for these last microbial groups. With regard to Gram-negative oxydase-negative microorganisms (567 isolates), non-betahemolytic streptococci (464 cases), and beta-hemolytic streptococci (260 isolates), a significant trend towards a reduction of frequency occurred from the year 2004 to 2007 (p<.05 to p<.001)