ABSTRACT
This paper describes the process of acquisition, cleaning, interpretation, coding and linguistic annotation of a collection of parliamentary debates from the Senate of the Italian Republic covering the COVID-19 pandemic emergency period and a former period for reference and comparison according to the CLARIN ParlaMint prescriptions. The corpus contains 1199 sessions and 79,373 speeches for a total of about 31 million words, and was encoded according to the ParlaCLARIN TEI XML format. It includes extensive metadata about the speakers, sessions, political parties and parliamentary groups. As required by the ParlaMint initiative, the corpus was also linguistically annotated for sentences, tokens, POS tags, lemmas and dependency syntax according to the universal dependencies guidelines. Named entity annotation and classification is also included. All linguistic annotation was performed automatically using state-of-the-art NLP technology with no manual revision. The Italian dataset is freely available as part of the larger ParlaMint 2.1 corpus deposited and archived in CLARIN repository together with all other national corpora. It is also available for direct analysis and inspection via various CLARIN services and has already been used both for research and educational purposes. © European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is still widespread. During the pandemic, the internet has been the preferred channel for health-related information, especially for less-educated citizens who tend to be the most hesitant about vaccination. A well-structured web communication strategy could help both to overcome vaccine hesitancy and to ensure equity in healthcare service access. This study investigated how the various regional and local health authorities in Italy used their institutional websites to inform users about COVID-19 vaccinations between March and April 2021. We browsed 129 institutional websites, checking the availability, quality and quantity, actionability and readability of information using a literature-based common grid. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests were performed. The online public dissemination of COVID-19 vaccination information in Italy was fragmented, both across and within regions. The side effects of vaccinations, were often not reported on the websites, thus missing an opportunity to enhance vaccination uptake. More focus should also be placed on readability, since readability indexes showed that they were difficult to understand. Our research revealed that several actions could be implemented to enhance online communication on COVID-19 vaccination. For instance, simplifying texts can make them more understandable and the information reported actionable.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 Vaccines , COVID-19 , COVID-19/prevention & control , Communication , Humans , Pandemics/prevention & control , VaccinationABSTRACT
Background: The use of COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) as experimental therapy during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has led to the need to quantify neutralizing antibodies (Abs) to SARS-CoV-2 to make it suitable for clinical use. In this respect, the National Blood Centre (CNS) and the National Centre for the Control and Evaluation of Medicines (CNCF) of the Istituto Superiore di Sanit(ISS) have organized an External Quality Assessment (EQA) exercise on serological methods for CCP Ab screening. Aims: To present the results deriving from the anti-SARS-COV-2 EQA program. Methods: Blood donations with anti-SARS-CoV-2 Abs at different concentrations were used as positive samples. Negative samples were prepared using a pool of plasma donations negative for anti-SARS-CoV-2 Abs and tested negative for HBV, HCV, HIV and Syphilis markers. A panel of 10 samples (two negative and eight positive) has been sent to each participating laboratory. Production, storage and distribution of the panels were carried out according to pre-established procedures to ensure the homogeneity and stability of the samples. The samples were tested for the presence of neutralizing Abs using a neutralization assay based on the use of lentiviral particles pseudotyped with the SARS-CoV-2 Spike glycoprotein, and expressing luciferase as a detection system infectivity in VERO E6 cells1.On the basis of anti- SARS-CoV-2 Ab content, the 10 panel samples were divided into four groups: negative (2 samples, ID90 < 20), low positive (2 samples ID90 ~ 50), medium positive (three samples, ID90 100-200) and high positive (three samples, ID90 300-800). 28 laboratories participated to the EQA study using five different methods. In particular, three laboratories participated with two different methods. Results: 30 out of 31 panels were correctly identified: one laboratory erroneously identified a negative sample as reactive. The re-test of the panel gave the correct result. Quantitative results (14 laboratories) were converted in Binding Antibody Unit (BAU/ml) using the conversion factor indicated by the kits' manufacturer. The conversion in BAU/ml allowed to standardize the results from different methods: in fact, after conversion, results seem to be more closed even if some differences are still present in two samples with a high content of IgG. Summary/Conclusions: The EQA exercise provided the participants a valid tool to test the laboratory performance and to highlight any critical issues concerning a not-routinely performed test, used by several blood establishments for the qualification of CCP. Moreover, the use of a common measure unit (BAU/ml) using the WHO international standard for SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulin seems to reduce the differences among methods improving the analytical and diagnostic comparability. However, it is not true for all samples tested. The intrinsic Ab composition of each samples tested (presence of different type of Abs, the Abs' avidity and specificity, time of recovery from the infection) may contribute to the persistence of differences of the results across methods. 1. Dispinseri S, Nat. Commun. 2021.