A Literature Review of the Effects of Air Pollution on COVID-19 Health Outcomes Worldwide: Statistical Challenges and Data Visualization.

Several peer-reviewed papers and reviews have examined the relationship between exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 spread and severity. However, many of the existing reviews on this topic do not extensively present the statistical challenges associated with this field, do not provide comprehensive guidelines for future researchers, and review only the results of a relatively small number of papers. We reviewed 139 papers, 127 of which reported a statistically significant positive association between air pollution and adverse COVID-19 health outcomes. Here, we summarize the evidence, describe the statistical challenges, and make recommendations for future research. To summarize the 139 papers with data from geographical locations around the world, we also present anopen-source data visualization tool that summarizes these studies and allows the research community to contribute evidence as new research papers are published.

Optimal policies for mitigating pandemic costs: a tutorial model.

There have been a number of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions associated with COVID-19 over the past two years. Various non-pharmaceutical interventions were proposed and implemented to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most common of these were partial and complete lockdowns that were used in an attempt to minimize the costs associated with mortality, economic losses and social factors, while being subject to constraints such as finite hospital capacity. Here, we use a minimal model posed in terms of optimal control theory to understand the costs and benefits of such strategies. This allows us to determine top-down policies for how to restrict social contact rates given an age-structured model for the dynamics of the disease. Depending on the relative weights allocated to mortality and socioeconomic losses, we see that the optimal strategies range from long-term social-distancing only for the most vulnerable, partial lockdown to ensure not over-running hospitals, and alternating-shifts, all of which lead to significant reduction in mortality and/or socioeconomic losses. Crucially, commonly used strategies that involve long periods of broad lockdown are almost never optimal, as they are highly unstable to reopening and entail high socioeconomic costs. Using parameter estimates from data available for Germany and the USA early in the pandemic, we quantify these policies and use sensitivity analysis in the relevant model parameters and initial conditions to determine the range of robustness of our policies. Finally we also discuss how bottom-up behavioral changes affect the dynamics of the pandemic and show how they can work in tandem with top-down control policies to mitigate pandemic costs even more effectively.

BNT162b2 Vaccine Effectiveness against Omicron in Children 5 to 11 Years of Age.

BACKGROUND: Limited evidence is available on the real-world effectiveness of the BNT162b2 vaccine against coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) and specifically against infection with the omicron variant among children 5 to 11 years of age. METHODS: Using data from the largest health care organization in Israel, we identified a cohort of children 5 to 11 years of age who were vaccinated on or after November 23, 2021, and matched them with unvaccinated controls to estimate the vaccine effectiveness of BNT162b2 among newly vaccinated children during the omicron wave. Vaccine effectiveness against documented severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and symptomatic Covid-19 was estimated after the first and second vaccine doses. The cumulative incidence of each outcome in the two study groups through January 7, 2022, was estimated with the use of the Kaplan-Meier estimator, and vaccine effectiveness was calculated as 1 minus the risk ratio. Vaccine effectiveness was also estimated in age subgroups. RESULTS: Among 136,127 eligible children who had been vaccinated during the study period, 94,728 were matched with unvaccinated controls. The estimated vaccine effectiveness against documented infection was 17% (95% confidence interval [CI], 7 to 25) at 14 to 27 days after the first dose and 51% (95% CI, 39 to 61) at 7 to 21 days after the second dose. The absolute risk difference between the study groups at days 7 to 21 after the second dose was 1905 events per 100,000 persons (95% CI, 1294 to 2440) for documented infection and 599 events per 100,000 persons (95% CI, 296 to 897) for symptomatic Covid-19. The estimated vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic Covid-19 was 18% (95% CI, -2 to 34) at 14 to 27 days after the first dose and 48% (95% CI, 29 to 63) at 7 to 21 days after the second dose. We observed a trend toward higher vaccine effectiveness in the youngest age group (5 or 6 years of age) than in the oldest age group (10 or 11 years of age). CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that as omicron was becoming the dominant variant, two doses of the BNT162b2 messenger RNA vaccine provided moderate protection against documented SARS-CoV-2 infection and symptomatic Covid-19 in children 5 to 11 years of age. (Funded by the European Union through the VERDI project and others.).

Mirroring hierarchical attention in adversary for crisis task identification: COVID-19, Hurricane Irma

A surge of instant local information on social media serves as the first alarming tone of need, supports, damage information, etc. during crisis. Identifying such signals primarily helps in reducing and suppressing the substantial impacts of the outbreak. Existing approaches rely on pre-trained models with huge historic information as well as on domain correlation. Additionally, existing models are often task specific and need auxiliary feature information. Mitigating these limitations, we introduce Mirrored Hierarchical Contextual Attention in Adversary (MHCoA2) model that is capable to operate under varying tasks of different crisis incidents. MHCoA2 provides attention by capturing contextual correlation among words to enhance task identification without relying on auxiliary information. The use of adversarial components and an additional feature extractor in MHCoA2 enhances its capability to achieve higher performance. MHCoA2 reports an improvement of 5 - 8% in terms of standard metrics on two real-world crisis incidents over the state-of-the-art. © 2021 Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM. All rights reserved.

Acute necrotising encephalopathy is more severe when associated with influenza

Background and objective: Acute Necrotising Encephalopathy (ANE) is a rare but potentially life-threatening condition associated with viral infections. A familial and recurrent form (ANE1) has been identified by mutations in the nuclear pore Ran Binding Protein (RANBP2). We report the morbidity and mortality when associated with Influenza infection. Method(s): We performed a review of paediatric ANE cases from 1999 to 2019 evaluating the clinical, biochemical, microbiological and neuroimaging appearances as well as outcomes. Result(s): The cohort comprised 6 children (2 boys), age ranging from 8 months to 3 years 9 months ( 2y n=5), of which 4 had a confirmed genetic diagnosis and 2 were RANBP2 negative. There were 13 episodes of encephalopathy, with recurrences in 3 cases (2 ANE1). 10 of these episodes had infectious aetiology identified: coronavirus n=2, parainfluenza n=1, adenovirus n=2, H influenzae n=1, influenza (H1N1 n=3, H3N2 n=1). Clinical features of fever and encephalopathy were consistent (100%), and seizures and sixth nerve palsies prominent (50% each). CSF revealed absent pleocytosis, normal-elevated protein and negative virology. Symmetric involvement of the thalami bilaterally was present in all cases, and all ANE1 cases were associated with haemorrhage and external capsule/claustrum involvement (100% specific and sensitive). The outcome following influenza infection was striking, death n=1, vegetative n=2, 4 limb motor and movement disorder n=1. 2 of these cases had previous episodes of encephalopathy with noninfluenza infection and did have recovery, albeit with moderate to severe disability. All 3 cases were never immunised against Influenza infection and suffered grave outcomes. Conclusion(s): Influenza infection in ANE has the poorest outcome therefore vaccination should be a mandatory consideration for the known cases of ANE.