Severe COVID-19 in the Basque Country, Spain: Risk Prediction Model with Genetic and Clinical Factors (preprint)

Risk stratification for adults infected with SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 continues to be essential to inform decisions about individual patients and allocation of resources and treatment options. Accurate knowledge of individual risk of severe COVID-19 can make an important contribution to healthcare both on a population and a personal level. There are currently few tools and solutions that help medical professionals to predict the evolution of SARS-COV-2 infected patients. So far, risk models for severe COVID-19 outcomes have included age and clinical comorbidities. The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly in Spain, one of Europe’s most affected countries. In this retrospective study we analyzed genotypic and phenotypic data from 659 patients in the Basque region of Spain during the first wave of COVID-19, and compared mild with severe COVID-19 cases. Using genetic variants data as well as clinical variables of the participants we built a prediction model of severe COVID-19. We obtained robust results in the training data set with 85% sensitivity, 67% specificity and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.78. In the validation set the AUC was 0.75. The main advantage of our model is that because it includes genetic variants it could be used with medical records to identify the critical population in advance.

Impact of Learning in the COVID-19 Era on Academic Outcomes of Undergraduate Psychology Students

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the containment measures adopted by the different governments, led to a boom in online education as a necessary response to the crisis posed against the education system worldwide. This study compares the academic performance of students between face-to-face and online modalities in relation to the exceptional situation between the months of March and June 2020. The academic performance in both modalities of a series of subjects taught in the Psychology Degree at the European University of the Atlantic (Santander, Spain) was taken into account. The results show that student performance during the final exam in the online modality is significantly lower than in the face-to-face modality. However, grades from the continuous evaluation activities are significantly higher online, which somehow compensates the overall grade of the course, with no significant difference in the online mode with respect to the face-to-face mode, even though overall performance is higher in the latter. The conditioning factors and explanatory arguments for these results are also discussed.