Fitting Early Phases of the COVID-19 Outbreak: A Comparison of the Performances of Used Models.

The COVID-19 outbreak involved a spread of prediction efforts, especially in the early pandemic phase. A better understanding of the epidemiological implications of the different models seems crucial for tailoring prevention policies. This study aims to explore the concordance and discrepancies in outbreak prediction produced by models implemented and used in the first wave of the epidemic. To evaluate the performance of the model, an analysis was carried out on Italian pandemic data from February 24, 2020. The epidemic models were fitted to data collected at 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 98 days (the entire time series). At each time step, we made predictions until May 31, 2020. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) were calculated. The GAM model is the most suitable parameterization for predicting the number of new cases; exponential or Poisson models help predict the cumulative number of cases. When the goal is to predict the epidemic peak, GAM, ARIMA, or Bayesian models are preferable. However, the prediction of the pandemic peak could be made carefully during the early stages of the epidemic because the forecast is affected by high uncertainty and may very likely produce the wrong results.

Knowledge assessment among subjects with chronic venous leg ulcer in outpatient setting: Translation and adaptation of a tool to identify subjects at risk of poor understanding.

Promotion of self-care is an important issue in the treatment of chronic diseases such as venous leg ulcers, as adequate self-care can prevent complications and ulcer recurrence. However, only a few tools have been developed and tested to assess the knowledge of patients with venous leg ulcers. This study aimed to translate, adapt and validate in an Italian language and context a questionnaire to assess the knowledge of patients with venous leg ulcers about their disease (pathophysiology, risk factors, lifestyle changes due to ulcer) and the proper management of the ulcer to prevent recurrence. This is a cross-sectional study divided into two phases: (1) translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the 'Educational Interventions in Venous Leg Ulcer Patients' tool in a six-stage process and (2) validation and reliability study with patients with active ulceration. There was great agreement for the English-to-Italian translation. In content validation, the tool showed good applicability among experts. Adjustments were made to improve semantic equivalence, and the questionnaire was made to be easy and quick to administer. The results of the target population showed a low level of knowledge among the patients. Knowing the deficiencies of the patients makes it possible to create educational projects to improve their abilities. Now more than ever, it is necessary to improve self-care and patient knowledge, allowing home care, improving autonomy, and avoiding hospital care that results in higher costs and risks. This questionnaire could be used in future studies to identify topics that need to be reinforced through education and to improve the awareness and self-care of these patients.

Increased risk of emergency department presentations for bronchiolitis in infants exposed to air pollution.

Air pollution has been linked to an increased risk of several respiratory diseases in children, especially respiratory tract infections. The present study aims to evaluate the association between pediatric emergency department (PED) presentations for bronchiolitis and air pollution. PED presentations due to bronchiolitis in children aged less than 1 year were retrospectively collected from 2007 to 2018 in Padova, Italy, together with daily environmental data. A conditional logistic regression based on a time-stratified case-crossover design was performed to evaluate the association between PED presentations and exposure to NO2 , PM2.5, and PM10. Models were adjusted for temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, and public holidays. Delayed effects in time were evaluated using distributed lag non-linear models. Odds ratio for lagged exposure from 0 to 14 days were obtained. Overall, 2251 children presented to the PED for bronchiolitis. Infants' exposure to higher concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 in the 5 days before the presentation to the PED increased the risk of accessing the PED by more than 10%, whereas high concentrations of NO2 between 2 and 12 days before the PED presentation were associated with an increased risk of up to 30%. The association between pollutants and infants who required hospitalization was even greater. A cumulative effect of NO2 among the 2 weeks preceding the presentation was also observed. In summary, PM and NO2 concentrations are associated with PED presentations and hospitalizations for bronchiolitis. Exposure of infants to air pollution could damage the respiratory tract mucosa, facilitating viral infections and exacerbating symptoms.

A SuperLearner Approach to Predict Run-In Selection in Clinical Trials.

A critical early step in a clinical trial is defining the study sample that appropriately represents the target population from which the sample will be drawn. Envisaging a "run-in" process in study design may accomplish this task; however, the traditional run-in requires additional patients, increasing times, and costs. The possible use of the available a-priori data could skip the run-in period. In this regard, ML (machine learning) techniques, which have recently shown considerable promising usage in clinical research, can be used to construct individual predictions of therapy response probability conditional on patient characteristics. An ensemble model of ML techniques was trained and validated on twin randomized clinical trials to mimic a run-in process within this framework. An ensemble ML model composed of 26 algorithms was trained on the twin clinical trials. SuperLearner (SL) performance for the Verum (Treatment) arm is above 70% sensitivity. The Positive Predictive Value (PPP) achieves a value of 80%. Results show good performance in the direction of being useful in the simulation of the run-in period; the trials conducted in similar settings can train an optimal patient selection algorithm minimizing the run-in time and costs of conduction.

Understanding the Factors Affecting COVID-19 Mortality in Italy: Does a Relationship Exist With a Sharp Increase in Intensive Care Unit Admissions?

OBJECTIVE: The present study aims to explore whether a relationship exists between the immediate sharp increase in intensive care unit (ICU) admissions and the mortality rates in Italy. METHODS: Official epidemiological data on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) were employed. The forward lagged (0, 3, 7, 14 days) daily variations in the number of deaths according to the number of days after the outbreak started and the daily increases in ICU admissions were estimated. RESULTS: A direct relationship between the sharp increase of ICU admissions and mortality rates has been shown. Furthermore, the analysis of the forward lagged daily variations in the number of deaths showed that an increase in the daily number of ICU admissions resulted in significantly higher mortality after 3, 7, and 14 days. The most pronounced effect was detected after 7 days, with 250 deaths (95% CI: 108.1-392.8) for the highest increase in the ICU admissions, from 100 to 200. CONCLUSIONS: These results would serve as a warning for the scientific community and the health care decision-makers to prevent a quick and out-of-control saturation of the ICU beds in case of a relapse of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Surplus Transplant Lung Allocation System in Italy: An Evaluation of the Allocation Process via Stochastic Modeling.

BACKGROUND: Lung transplantation is a specialized procedure used to treat chronic end-stage respiratory diseases. Due to the scarcity of lung donors, constructing fair and equitable lung transplant allocation methods is an issue that has been addressed with different strategies worldwide. This work aims to describe how Italy's "national protocol for the management of surplus organs in all transplant programs" functions through an online app to allocate lung transplants. We have developed two probability models to describe the allocation process among the various transplant centers. An online app was then created. The first model considers conditional probabilities based on a protocol flowchart to compute the probability for each area and transplant center to receive each n-th organ in the period considered. The second probability model is based on the generalization of the binomial distribution to correlated binary variables, which is based on Bahadur's representation, to compute the cumulative probability for each transplant center to receive at least nth organs. Our results show that the impact of the allocation of a surplus organ depends mostly on the region where the organ was donated. The discrepancies shown by our model may be explained by a discrepancy between the northern and southern regions in relation to the number of organs donated.

Profiling Delirium Progression in Elderly Patients via Continuous-Time Markov Multi-State Transition Models.

Poor recognition of delirium among hospitalized elderlies is a typical challenge for health care professionals. Considering methodological insufficiency for assessing time-varying diseases, a continuous-time Markov multi-state transition model (CTMMTM) was used to investigate delirium evolution in elderly patients. This is a longitudinal observational study performed in September 2016 in an Italian hospital. Change of delirium states was modeled according to the 4AT score. A Cox model (CM) and a CTMMTM were used for identifying factors affecting delirium onset both with a two-state and three-state model. In this study, 78 patients were enrolled and evaluated for 5 days. Both the CM and the CTMMTM show that urine catheter (UC), aging, drugs, and invasive devices (ID) are risk factors for delirium onset. The CTMMTM model shows that transition from no-delirium/cognitive impairment to delirium was associated with aging (HR = 1.14; 95%CI, 1.05, 1.23) and neuroleptics (HR = 4.3; 1.57, 11.77), dopaminergic drugs (HR = 3.89; 1.2, 12.6), UC (HR = 2.92; 1.09, 7.79) and ID (HR = 1.67; 103, 2.71). These results are confirmed by the multivariable model. Aging, ID, antibiotics, drugs affecting the central nervous system, and absence of moving ability are identified as the significant predictors of delirium. Additionally, it seems that modeling with CTMMTM may show associations that are not directly detectable with the traditional CM.

Excess of all-cause mortality is only partially explained by COVID-19 in Veneto (Italy) during spring outbreak.

BACKGROUND: Italy has been the first European country to be affected by the COVID-19 epidemic which started out at the end of February. In this report, we focus our attention on the Veneto Region, in the North-East of Italy, which is one of the areas that were first affected by the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2. We aim to evaluate the trend of all-cause mortality and to give a description of the characteristics of the studied population. METHODS: Data used in the analyses were released by the majority of municipalities and cover the 93% of the total population living in the Veneto Region. We evaluated the trend of overall mortality from Jan.01 to Jun.30. 2020. Moreover we compared the COVID-19-related deaths to the overall deaths. RESULTS: From March 2020, the overall mortality rate increased exponentially, affecting males and people aged > 76 the most. The confirmed COVID-19-related death rate in the Veneto region between Mar.01 and Apr.302020 is 30 per 100,000 inhabitants. In contrast, the all-cause mortality increase registered in the same months in the municipalities included in the study is 219 per 100,000 inhabitants. CONCLUSIONS: COVID-19 has a primary role in the increase in mortality but does not entirely explain such a high number of deaths. Strategies need to be developed to reduce this gap in case of future waves of the pandemic.