Corporate QE in Europe during the COVID-19 crisis and debt overhang

This paper finds that shareholders of highly leveraged firms benefit relatively less compared to bondholders from the corporate QE announcements by the ECB and the Bank of England, 2020, as evidence of debt overhang. Firms more heavily impacted by the pandemic gain less from corporate QE, which could also reflect debt overhang. The monetary and fiscal responses to the pandemic are complements in the sense that a stronger pandemic-related fiscal response and higher pre-announcement sovereign CDS spreads enhance the positive effects of corporate QE on equity and debt valuations. © 2023 The Authors

The Design and Utilisation of PanSim, a Portable Pandemic Simulator

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a clear and present need for urgent decision making. Set in an environment of uncertain and unreliable data, and a diverse range of possible interventions, there is an obvious need for integrating HPC into workflows that include model calibration, and the exploration of the decision space. In this paper, we present the design of PanSim, a portable, performant, and productive agent-based simulator, which has been extensively used to model and forecast the pandemic in Hungary. We show its performance and scalability on CPUs and GPUs, then we discuss the workflows PanSim integrates into. We describe the heterogeneous, resource-constrained HPC environment available to us, and formulate a scheduling optimisation problem, as well as heuristics to solve them, to either minimise the execution time of a given number of simulations or to maximise the number of simulations executed in a given time frame. © 2022 IEEE.

A Survey of Sars-Cov-2 Genetic Material Reduction during a Traditional Wastewater Treatment Technology

The transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 in a community can be monitored by a wastewater-based epidemiological approach due to fecal shedding. Although sewage surveillance has gained a con-siderable amount of attention over the last 16 months, an indirect issue within the topic is whether traditional wastewater treatment technologies are sufficiently efficient to eliminate the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2. Samples were taken from the Wastewater Treatment Plant in Nagykanizsa before the virus was concentrated, nucleic acid extracted and SARS-CoV-2 detected by RT-qPCR (Quantitative reverse transcription PCR). The influent and primary treated samples tested positive, while after the secondary treatment, all the results were negative. Consequently, the activated sludge process proved to be efficient in terms of the removal of SARS-CoV-2.

The effect of trauma admission on adverse outcomes and progression of frailty

INTRODUCTION/HYPOTHESIS: Frailty is recognized as a predictor of complications and poor outcomes in the geriatric patient population. Our aim was to study the prevalence of frailty and outcomes in patients following trauma admission to a critical care unit. We hypothesize the presence of admission frailty will be an independent predictor of higher mortality, increased length of stay, and will progress as a result of traumatic injuries post hospitalization within all age groups older than 24years old. METHODS: A prospective observational study was performed over a 3-month period on trauma patients in a trauma critical care unit. An admission frailty and at 6 weeks post-discharge frailty was determine using the 5-item FRAIL Scale. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board Ethics Committee. All comparisons were performed at a level of significance of p ≤ 0.05. RESULTS: Of the 110 patients admitted to the Trauma ICU from January to March 2021, 25% were considered frail vs. 20% pre-frail vs. 55% non-frail. Mean age of frailty was 70 years old, the youngest age being 48 years old. Pre-frail patients with a mean age of 58 years old, a minimum age of 31years old. Comparing frail vs. non-frail patients', the frail patients had a higher mortality rate (57.1 vs 42.86% p- 0.16);Covid positivity (80 vs 20%, p- 0.03);ETOH (75 vs 25%, p-0.08);sepsis diagnosis (100% vs 0 p-0.09). No statistical significance in ICU LOS (p-0.16) and injury severity score (p-0.43). Statistical significance was achieved between the groups for HTN (p-< 0.0001) and DM (p-0.03). At 6-week post discharge frailty assessment of 67 patients demonstrated statistical significance between admission and post discharge frailty (p-< 0.0001). 25% of the admitted non-frail patients progress to frail state on post-discharge evaluation. 21% of the admitted non-frail patients progress to a pre-frail state. 19% percent of the admitted pre-frail patients progress to a frail state. CONCLUSIONS: Although statistical significance was not achieved in mortality and LOS, both groups trended in the direction towards significance, calling for a larger randomized control trial. We did, however, demonstrate that trauma admission increases frailty scores in all groups. This trend was most revealing in the non-geriatric group.