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The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented event that has brought deep changes in hospital facilities with reshaping of the health system organization, revealing inadequacies of current hospital and local health systems. When the COVID-19 emergency will end, further evaluation of the national health system, new organization of acute wards, and a further evolution of the entire health system will be needed to improve care during the chronic phase of disease. Therefore, new standards for healthcare personnel, more efficient organization of hospital facilities for patients with acute illnesses, improvement of technological approaches, and better integration between hospital and territorial services should be pursued. With experience derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, new models, paradigms, interventional approaches, values and priorities should be suggested and implemented.

In over a year, the COVID-19 pandemic caused 2.69 million deaths and 122 million infections. Social isolation and distancing measures have been the only prevention available for months. Scientific research has done a great deal of work, developing in a few months safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19. In the European Union, nowadays, four vaccines have been authorized for use: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, ChAdOx1 (AstraZeneca/Oxford), Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), and three others are currently under rolling review.Vaccine allocation policy is crucial to optimize the advantage of treatment preferring people with the highest risk of contagion. These days the priority in the vaccination program is of particular importance since it has become clear that the number of vaccines is not sufficient for the entire Italian population in the short term. Cardiovascular diseases are frequently associated with severe COVID-19 infections, leading to the worst prognosis. The elderly population suffering from cardiovascular diseases is, therefore, to be considered a particularly vulnerable population. However, age cannot be considered the only discriminating factor because in the young-adult population suffering from severe forms of heart disease, the prognosis, if affected by COVID-19, is particularly ominous and these patients should have priority access to the vaccination program. The aim of this position paper is to establish a consensus on a priority in the vaccination of COVID-19 among subjects suffering from different cardiovascular diseases.

Introduction: Epidemiology is increasingly involved on a wide variety of topics and to engage different professionals and disciplines in an increasingly active way. A fundamental role is played by young researchers active in Italian epidemiology who create opportunities for meeting and discussion, in the name of multidisciplinarity and integration of different skills., Objective: The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed description of the topics most frequently studied in epidemiology by young people and to highlight any changes in these topics in the pre- and post-Covid-19 workplaces., Methods: All abstracts submitted in the years 2019 and 2022 by young participants in the Maccacaro Prize, an annual award aimed at Italian association of epidemiology (Aie) conference addressed to people under 35 years of age, were considered. In addition to the comparison of the topics, a comparison of the related work structures and their geographical location was carried out by grouping the research centres into three Italian geographical regions: north, centre and south/islands., Results: Between 2019 and 2022, the number of abstracts participating in the Maccacaro Prize increased. The interest in topics related to infectious diseases, vaccines, and pharmaco-epidemiology has sharply increased, while in environmental and maternal and child epidemiology it has moderately increased. Social epidemiology, health promotion and prevention, as well as clinical and evaluative epidemiology, have experienced a decrease in interest. Finally, after analysing the geographical distribution of reference centres, it was discovered that certain regions, such as Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Latium, have a strong and consistent presence of young people in the field of epidemiology. Conversely, there is a small number of young professionals working in this field in other Italian regions, especially in Southern regions., Conclusions: The pandemic has changed our personal and working habits, but it has also played a fundamental role in making epidemiology known. The increase in young people joining an association such as the Aie is a clear sign of the growing interest in this discipline.

The generation of rapid information has been an important novelty in the COVID-19 pandemic and a challenge for epidemiology. The methodological frailty and uncertainty of rapid data use has been a consequence. We are talking about an 'intermezzo' epidemiology between the event and the production of consolidated data that opens up great opportunities to the use epidemiology for rapid public health decisions, provided a careful work to be done before emergencies. In Italy, an ad hoc national COVID-19 information system producing daily data that quickly became essential for public decision-making. Total and all-cause mortality data are derived from the traditional information system of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat), which, at the onset of the pandemic, was unable to provide rapid total and all-causes mortality data at the national level and still produces them with a one- to two-month delay. National cause and place mortality data referred to the first epidemic wave (March and April 2020) was in May 2021 and recently updated (October 2022) for the whole year 2020. Nearly three years after the onset of the epidemic, we have no nationwide rapid information on the distribution of deaths by place of death (hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities, home) neither on their breakdown in 'by COVID-19', 'with COVID-19', and 'non-COVID-19' deaths. The pandemic being still in progress, new problems arise (the long-term impact of COVID-19, the impact of lockdown policies, etcetera), whose solution cannot be postponed until peer reviewed papers are available. A fine-tuning of the rapid processing of interim data certainly requires the development of national and regional information systems, but first of all a methodologically robust 'intermezzo' epidemiology.

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Background: Health Information Systems (HIS) play a strategic role in the development of community healthcare services, a field still underdeveloped in Italy as shown by the COVID-19 pandemic, and their use for epidemiological purposes is increasing over the years. However, some general critical issues have been reported concerning national community health information systems, but no detailed study was found after a non-systematic review in Medline database and institutional websites., Objectives: to assess uniformity and comparability of health information collected by the national health information Systems for Home Care (SIAD), Nursing Homes (FAR), and Hospices (HOS) in Italy, three healthcare settings sharing patients with common conditions and healthcare needs., Methods: information was gathered from current Technical Regulations Papers of the Italian Health Ministry. All variables of the three Information Systems were ordered on the basis of the characteristics provided by the ministerial documents into a single grouping model created for the purpose and their distribution compared among and between the Systems. According to the grouping model, the variables were divided in two main groups: System Variables for administrative, bill, and identification-personal data and the Pathway Variables for patient's conditions and provided healthcare data. Common information content variables among all systems and between two of them were then identified, highlighting those with also identical terminology and allowed values. On the basis of the percentages of common and identical variables, uniformity in content and terminology was then calculated among all systems and between two of them. Besides, levels of content and terminology agreement have been calculated with Cohen's K matching the three Systems in all possible combinations of pairs., Results: there are 70 variables in SIAD, 45 variables in FAR, and 34 in HOS. System variables are nearly the half in FAR and HOS, 22 (48.9%) and 17 (50.0%) variables, respectively. Pathway variables are prevalent only in SIAD, with 55 variables (78.6%). Only SIAD and HOS use ICD-9-CM, with 2 (2.8%) and 9 (26.5%) variables, respectively. The three Systems share 18 common variables, with other 16 common between just two of them. Considering the common variables, the total number of variables used by all the Systems is 97, with 23 System variables (23.7%) and 74 Pathway variables (76.3%). Overall, content uniformity among the three Systems is 18.5%, but becomes 60.9% considering only the System variables and 5.4% for the Pathway variables, with respectively 14 and 4 common variables. Among the common variables, 11 have the same denomination and allowed values, with an overall terminological uniformity of 11.3%. Being all of them System variables, no terminological uniformity has been found among the three Systems.The level of content agreement was fair for the couple FAR-HOS (K Cohen 0.26), but null for HOS-SIAD and SIAD-FAR (K Cohen -0.20 and <0.01). Null was also the level of terminological agreement in all the possible pairs of matched systems (K Cohen all negative)., Conclusions: content and terminology uniformity of National Health Information Systems in Italy for Home Care, Nursing Homes, and Hospices has been found to be poor, with little reference to standardised classification systems and a scarce level of comparability of the information gathered in the three healthcare settings, although similarity in patients' characteristics and provided health services. Data comparability among them is mainly limited to administrative and identification-personal information, with little possibility of comparing information on patients' conditions and provided healthcare in the three settings. This scarce uniformity might undermine the contribution of national Health Information Systems in the development of community healthcare services in Italy and limit the potential of epidemiological research in this area. Also in the light of the establishment of new national Health Information Systems for Primary Care and Community Hospitals, a methodological reassessment of languages, codes, and evaluation tools used by community health services and information systems is needed.

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This paper stems from the «Progetto Pilota Natalità» in the province of Modena of the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy. Run between 2019 and 2021, the project introduces new evidence related to family policies in the Province of Modena. Specifically, we integrate primary qualitative firm-level evidence gathered during the Covid-19 pandemic with data on the voluntary organizations operating in the Italian third sector obtained just before the Covid-19 outbreak. We provide meaningful insights at the intersection of the public, the private and the voluntary sectors, while setting some guidelines to move forward in the design and implementation of family policies that are sensible across the territory. The study is interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and, as a result, is mainly centered around two themes: (1) the processes involved in the territorialization of public policy, particularly family policies, that entail local collective action levers and bottom-up resilience for the application of national policies; (2) the potential of these policies in terms of social innovation, understood as the joint design of a social infrastructure within a value allocation process between the actors involved, given certain time and space aspects. The paper explores the dimensionality of social innovation through the emergence and the scaling up of innovative processes as a result of devolved governance from national and EU levels to the local level, which gives precisely the framework of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islam in Italy is highly discussed but not significantly institutionalized. Polemics about its presence (and anti-multiculturalism in general) have often preceded any real multicultural politics, and the recognition of religious minorities arrived with immigration, such as Islam. The Covid pandemics has made visible one of the aspects of the necessary de facto acknowledgement of the presence of Islam: the problem of Muslim cemeteries, up to that moment avoided or postponed as much as possible by local municipalities, with few exceptions. As an outcome of an empirical research on Muslim in Italy during the pandemics, the paper aims to explore the different attitudes of Muslims families and communities facing the problem of being buried in the municipality they lived in, instead of repatriating the bodies as it was the most common procedure until Covid. The research shows the attempt of Muslims to minimize friction with Italian norms and institutions, through a re-interpretation of the symbolic border between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the idea of purity, contamination and separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has forced a reshaping of economic, productive, commercial and healthcare systems. The last one had the dual mandate to limit intra-hospital infections and strengthen its ability to deal with the ongoing emergency. In this paper we report the experience gained by the staff of the Nephrology and Dialysis Unit of the AULSS7 Pedemontana (Vicenza - Veneto region) and the organizational model pursued during the first wave of the pandemic., (Copyright by Società Italiana di Nefrologia SIN, Rome, Italy.)

The spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has reached a pandemic dimension within a few weeks. Italy has been one of the first countries, together with Cina, dealing with the outbreak of COVID-19 and adopting severe measures to limit viral transmission. The spread of COVID-19 may have several implications in organ transplant activity and medical and nursing personnel should be know these implications. The initial experience gained during the COVID-19 outbreak shows that around 10% of infected patients in Italy need intensive care management to overcome the acute respiratory distress syndrome. Due to the exponential rise of infected patients we are now facing an actual risk of saturation of potential tissue donors which can adversely affect the overall donation activity and reduce the number of transplants. Italian preliminary data show an overall decrease of 40% in March 2020. This paper aim at showing how the pandemic affects procurement of corneal tissues through a comparative analysis 2019-2020 related to the quarter February-April.

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Aim of this paper is to describe the management of an outbreak of COVID-19 in a slaughtering and meat processing plant in Bari Province (Southern Italy). At the end of the outbreak investigation, 18.4% of the employees were positive to the molecular test for SARS-CoV-2. Higher prevalence has been reported in the bovine slaughtering house and swine meat processing plant.In addition to lack of physical distancing and correct use of personal protective equipment, the spread of the virus has been eased by low level of literacy, indoor microclimate, intensive working time, and aerosol-generating procedures in specific areas of the processing plant where more positive cases have been detected. The analysis of this cluster may suggest specific actions to prevent similar outbreaks in the future.

This paper aims to describe the Italian obstetric surveillance system (ItOSS) preparedness as an element for a timely response to the new Coronavirus pandemic. ItOSS is a surveillance network that has been collecting data on maternal mortality and conducting population studies on obstetric near misses since 2013. At the beginning of the pandemic, ItOSS launched a new population-based project to monitor SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy and post-partum and promptly give back information useful to clinicians and decision-makers. All the regions and autonomous provinces, for a total of 289 birth units (PN), joined the study. Data relating to pregnant or post-partum women with a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection diagnosis addressing the maternities for outpatient visits or hospitalization were collected. The project methodology entails that each participating maternity reports the cases to ItOSS uploading data through an open-source platform. The on-line form includes sociodemographic and clinical data and maternal-neonatal outcomes. Biological samples to detect possible vertical transmission are also collected voluntarily. A total of 534 incident cases were reported from February 25th to July 10th 2020; 7 regions also collected biological samples for 227 cases; data collection is still ongoing.A preliminary analysis of the first 146 SARS-CoV-2 positive women who gave birth between February 25th to April 22nd shows an incidence rate of the infection equal to 2.1/1,000 in Italy and 6.9/1,000 in the Lombardy Region (Northern Italy). The brief time needed to setting up and operating the project, the national coverage, the adoption of shared tools for data collection, the quality and completeness of the information collected show how the availability of active networks like ItOSS represents a crucial element to hold a high level of preparedness in case of a health emergency.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, international organizations, institutions, and experts firstly recommended face masks for the population only in symptomatic subjects, but today various countries recommend or require their use even outdoor. In Italy, there was an obligation in closed places accessible to the public, including means of transport, and always if the safety distance was not continuously guaranteed. Various regions have long imposed obligations everywhere but at one's own home, and now the mandate has become national. This contribution critically analyses the randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on the effectiveness of medical masks in preventing respiratory infections in university/community contexts and outdoor gatherings, with questions and answers based on reasoning where possible based on evidence. It discusses whether the evidence supporting the WHO positions is weak compared to more stringent policies; it considers some underestimated adverse effects of the prolonged use of masks in the community and especially outdoors, not only by persons doing physical activity. This paper discusses some differences between SARS and COVID-19 in the potential impact of the masks and proposes to consider the most valid evidence available, avoiding prolonged/continuous use without valid needs for face masks, especially outdoors, waiting for others pragmatic RCTs that clarify conclusively a net balance between expected benefits and possible damages. KEYWORDS: facemasks effectiveness; medical masks safety - side effects; medical masks and SARS-CoV-2.

Systematic reviews have shown a prevalence close to 20% of gastrointestinal symptoms in COVID-19 positive patients, with nearly 40% of patients shedding viral RNA in their faeces, even if it may not be infectious, possibly because of inactivation by colonic fluid.According to current evidence, this virus is primarily transmitted by respiratory droplets and contact routes, including contaminated surfaces. The virus is quite stable on stainless steel, being detected up to 48-72 hours after application. Therefore, some individuals can be infected touching common contaminated surfaces, such as bathroom taps. Taps can be underestimated critical points in the transmission chain of the infection. Indeed, just by turning the knob, people leave germs on it, especially after coughing over their hands, sneezing, and/or blowing their nose. After handwashing with soap, user take back their germs when turning the knob. Paradoxically, the following user collects the germs back on his/her fingers by implementing a preventive measure, maybe before putting food into the mouth or wearing contact lenses.The Italian National Institute of Health recommends to clean and disinfect high-touched surfaces, but it is unrealistic and inefficient to do so after each tap use. As an alternative, new toilets should install long elbow-levers - or at least short levers - provided that people are educated to close them with the forearm or the side of the hand. This is already a standard measure in hospitals, but it is particularly important also in high-risk communities, such as retirement homes and prisons. It would be important also in schools, in workplaces, and even in families, contributing to the prevention both of orofaecal and respiratory infections.In the meantime, people should be educated to close existing knobs with disposable paper towel wipes or with toilet paper sheets.

THE CONTEXT: among the community health services representing a resource to face the COVID-19 emergency, there are the Family Care Centres (FCCs). A national study coordinated by the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) and funded by the Italian Ministry of Health, recently described their activities and needs, highlighting a large interregional variability in the number of centres and staff availability. Ante and post-natal care, cervical cancer screening and actions addressed at teenagers are the FCCs strategic activities. THE CF IN FRONT OF COVID-19: despite the need to limit the offer of care to the services that cannot be postponed during the lockdown, many FCCs have been exemplary in promptly reorganizing activities in the new context. The paper presents a selection of experiences carried out from March to June 2020 by some FCCs in different Italian Regions concerning FCCs strategic activities. CONCLUSIONS: the combined reading of some of the results of the ISS study and of the activities implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic offers a measure of the ability of the FCCs to respond to the needs of the community and to adapt to change. These services based on an innovative health model deserve enhancement and support.

This paper focuses on the role played and practices adopted by the "European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment" (CPT) during the pandemic. In this period, CPT had to adapt its functioning due to severe travel restrictions, but nevertheless managed to successfully fulfil its mandate, by formalising also ten "Principles relating to the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty in the context of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic" in March 2020. Starting from these principles, and with reference to the Italian context, we also intend to investigate whether and how CPT pandemic practices have affected prisoners' rights. Our analysis will also concern the role and function of the "National Guarantor for the Rights of Persons Detained or Deprived of Liberty". In Italy, this institutional body acts also as "National Preventive Mechanisms (NPMs)", in accordance with The Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Giornale di Medicina Militare is the property of Difesa Servizi S.p.A. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The essay presents the perceptions about risk and trust collected in Italy during the first year of Covid-19 using secondary analysis data. The aim is to show how the fallout of the pandemic goes beyond the sphere of health and extends to those of individual action and social relations. The hypothesis is that the prolonged interruption of the normality of everyday life has temporarily halted the individualisation process. Risk, mistrust, uncertainty of social cohesion and deterioration of public debate, as observed in the survey, have contributed to reducing the space for the achievement of personal autonomy by producing heteronomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of publications in Italian are focusing on remote work, especially after the lockdown forced thousands of workers to perform their jobs away from their office. However, there is little research in Italian that approaches the topic from a gender perspective. Through its literature review, the contribution challenges the idea that remote work improves the balance between different times of living and reduces gender inequalities. The article argues that it is necessary to contextualize remote work, because in asymmetrical gender regimes such as in Italy, this modality can deepen the traditional gender division of labour. The contribution revisits the notions used in the literature to refer to remote work and work-life balance from a gender perspective. Thereafter, it studies and contextualizes the impact that remote work has on the balance between times of living. Finally, the conclusion identifies areas in which further research is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Related to the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-June 2020), some recent studies on the application of content analysis of geolocalized tweets (Bashar et alii 2020, Punziano et alii 2020) have demonstrated the negative relation between the Coronavirus spread (with Northern Italy most affected) and the polarity of social narratives about the pandemic. In brief, the «resilient» social narrative of the most impacted regions has corresponded to a negative and worried emergency narrative of the less affected regions. In relation to epidemiological data, the second phase of the pandemic (also referred to as the «second wave», in autumn 2020) has been very different from the first (ISSa 2020). The severity of emergency, without considering questions about the reliability of the first wave data (Istat 2020a), has been more relevant and homogeneous across Italy. The study questions whether there are differences between the geography of contagion and that of the narrative. Given the increasingly homogeneous spread of the virus, the assumption has been that the digital arena also has ended up showing a narrative more united on negative sentiments. The issue is addressed by analyzing a corpus of geolocalized tweets, extracted in the period from the new October lockdown to the partial and fragmented pre-Christmas reopenings in 2020. Following the application of a model combining text mining and GIS analysis, the most recurrent themes in social discourse on Twitter were mapped. This geography of emerging social narratives (COVID-Issues) compared with the geography of contagion spread (COVID-Spread) and the norms (COVID-Measures) allowed to detect the trend in the relationship of these three dimensions during the second emergence from COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Il Capitale Culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage is the property of Il Capitale Culturale Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)