People Counting in the Times of Covid-19

Estimating the number of people within a public building with multiple entrances is an interesting problem, especially when limitations on building occupancy hold as during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, we illustrate the design, prototyping and assessment of an open-source distributed Cloud-IoT service that performs such a task and detects crowd formation via EdgeAI, also accounting for privacy and security concerns. The service is deployed and thoroughly assessed over a low-cost Fog infrastructure, showing an average accuracy of 94%. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

People Counting in the Times of Covid-19

Estimating the number of people within a public building with multiple entrances is an interesting problem, especially when limitations on building occupancy hold as during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, we illustrate the design, prototyping and assessment of an open-source distributed Cloud-IoT service that performs such a task and detects crowd formation via EdgeAI, also accounting for privacy and security concerns. The service is deployed and thoroughly assessed over a low-cost Fog infrastructure, showing an average accuracy of 94%. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Convalescent plasma for haematological patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia and severe depletion of B-cell lymphocytes following anti-CD20 therapy: a single-centre experience and review of the literature

Convalescent plasma (CP) therapy might be effective in patients with haematological malignanciesand B-cell depletion. We report a single-centre experience of COVID-19 patients with non-Hodgkinlymphoma and absence of B-cells as a consequence of anti-CD20 therapy successfully treated withCP from October 2020 to May 2021. CP was given in the presence of pneumonia with respiratoryfailure despite standard treatment and consisted of three infusions on an alternate-day basis. A reviewof the current literature on this topic was also performed. Six patients were identified (medianage 59.5 years (range 50-73)). The last anti-CD20 drug administration occurred 60 days before infection(range 0-360). CP was administered after a median of 51 days (range 9-120) from SARS-CoV-2diagnosis, with an early improvement in all but one subject. We suggest a possible clinical benefitof convalescent CP treatment in COVID-19 patients with haematological malignancies and B-celldepletion having persistent/recurrent pneumonia.