ABSTRACT
Since February 2020, strategies aimed at containing and managing the Covid-19 syndemic have been developed by the governments of European countries. Among these measures, the possibility of an early treatment of the disease has been considered of fundamental importance, both for curing the disease and governing the syndemic. Despite their potential, early therapies received a somehow unexpected treatment in Italy and the debate around them gave rise to a very evident conflict between proponents and opponents of those treatments, to the point that some of the former organised a properly political movement in order to promote the integration of early home therapies in the official health protocols. Not surprisingly, the issue of early therapies has been considered an exemplary case of politicisation of science. However, the assimilation of the early therapy controversy to the frame of politicisation of science cannot fully explain why these protocols were discarded by political and health authorities. Rather, the consideration of health protocols as socio-technical objects shifts the attention on the vast range of cultural, political and economic factors that contributed to the general resistance towards those treatments. Therefore, we aim to analyse the media coverage of the phenomenon, and investigate the protocols of home treatment of Covid-19, paying attention to the interaction of the factors that contributed to the exclusion of home therapies into national guidelines.
ABSTRACT
Objectives Background Social isolation is probably one of the most affected health outcomes in the elderly people, particularly those living alone, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we try to identify it by detecting changes in the elderly such as malnutrition and lack of mobility. Material and methods The system consists of two types of sensors installed at various locations in the user's home: Passive infrared (PIR) sensors and reed switch sensors. It was implemented for 15 days in the home of a 26-year-old student living alone, as a first step to later be deployed in the home of elderly people. Results Our study showed strong similarities between the activities detected by the algorithm and the real activity pattern of the interviewed individual. In addition, the system was able to identify two daily patterns (weekday and weekend) of the person as he is a student and is present in class during the week. Conclusion A system composed of low-cost, unobtrusive, non-intrusive and miniaturized sensors is able to detect meal-taking activity and mobility. These results are an intermediate step in assessing the potential risk of social isolation in older people living alone based on these ADLs.Copyright © 2023 AGBM
ABSTRACT
The spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has enormously increased the media exposure of scientists, some of whom have become well-known and even popular. However, it may also have signaled the beginning of an unexpected decline in public trust towards them. Responsibility for this can be ascribed not only to distortions in the communication of scientific knowledge by the media, but also to dynamics that exist within the scientific community and how they have been expressed in the media. In fact, frequently during the pandemic, not only did scientists publicly display a high level of conflict, but they also made claims that were outside their specific areas of expertise. From a pilot study conducted on about 4,000 readers of two online newspapers, five latent dimensions emerged with respect to attitudes towards science and scientists. A consistent element of people (between 20% and 30%, so still largely a minority) seems to share a non-scientist epistemological model, unmoored to presumed certainties and absolute truths. This phenomenon, based on the responses of those interviewed, seems to be associated particularly with a critical attitude regarding the public exposure of scientists and their way of communicating in the mass media, and not with a general skepticism towards science and its role in society. © 2022. Comunicazione Politica. All Rights Reserved.