Résumé
After some initial hesitancy at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the academic community agreed that the infection process is mostly airborne and generally associated with closed environments. Therefore, assessing the indoor infection probability is mandatory to contain the spread of the disease, especially in those environments, like school classrooms, hospital wards or public transportation, with higher risk of overcrowding. For this reason, we developed a software tool in Python to compute infection probability and determine those mechanisms that contribute to reduce its diffusion in closed settings. In this paper, we will briefly illustrate the model we used and focus our attention on the description of the main features of the software and give some examples of how it can be used in clinical practice to predict the spread of the disease in the rooms of a generic ward, optimize room occupancy or drive healthcare workers activity schedule. Finally, some limitations and further implementations of our work will be reported.
Résumé
Introduction: Obesity is considered one of the possible risk factors for hospitalization and intensive care in Covid-19 patients. It is believed that obesity may compromise some steps of the immune response and may affect the development of post-vaccine immunological memory. The aim of our study was to assess the post-vaccination IgG response against the spike protein (S-RBD IgG) in relation to age, gender and body mass index (BMI). Material and Methods: The study involved 766 Healthcare Workers who received two doses of BioNTech/Pfizer vaccination (December 2020-March 2021) and were tested for S-RBD IgG (CMIA) 20-40 days after the second vaccine dose. These subjects were always negative to SARS CoV-2 nasopharyngeal periodical swabs and were negative to Ab anti SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 IgG (CLIA) measured before the first dose of vaccine. Results: The 766 workers (70.8% female and 29.2% male) were all positive for the antibody levels determined after the second dose of vaccine (S-RDB IgG range: 190.8-63093 AU/mL). Multivariable data analysis showed that the increase in the S-RBD IgG was more pronounced in younger subjects (p<0.001) and in women (p<0.05). Data analysis also showed an increase in the levels of S-RDB IgG in subjects with greater BMI (p<0.05). Conclusion: At a first check (20-40 days after the vaccination), the SARS-Co-V-2 antibody levels in the studied sample were influenced by age and gender, as expected. Contrary to data reported by others, subjects with greater BMI showed an increased antibody response, but this finding, as well as the temporal trend of antibody levels, need to be further investigated.