ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has already caused more than 150,000,000 cases worldwide. In Spain this has lead to a massive and simultaneous saturation of all sanitary regions. Coherently, the quick and consistent understanding of the COVID-19 disease requires of the combined analysis of thousands of medical records generated by dozens of different institutions. In the context of the publicly funded CIBERES-UCI-COVID project, we have gathered, cleaned and preprocessed data from heterogeneous sources - more than 30 hospitals, with different data entry systems - in order to produce a unified database, of more than 6.000 patients, that is used in several clinical studies being carried by different multidisciplinary groups. In this paper, we identify the complexities we encountered, the solutions we applied, and we summarise the statistical and machine learning techniques we have applied for the studies. © 2021 The authors and IOS Press.
ABSTRACT
As COVID-19 transmissions spread worldwide, governments have announced and enforced travel restrictions to prevent further infections. Such restrictions have a direct effect on the volume of international flights among these countries, resulting in extensive social and economic costs. To better understand the situation in a quantitative manner, we analyzed the OpenSky Network data to clarify flight patterns and flight densities around the world. Then we observed relationships between flight numbers with new infection cases and the economy (the unemployment rate) in Barcelona. We found that the number of daily flights gradually decreased and then suddenly dropped 64% during the second half of March in 2020 after the United States and Europe enacted travel restrictions. We also observed a 51% decrease in the global flight network density decreased during this period. Regarding new COVID-19 cases, the United States had an unexpected surge regardless of travel restrictions. Finally, the layoffs for temporary workers in the tourism and airplane business increased by 4.3 fold in the weeks following Spain's decision to close its borders. © 2020 IEEE.