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This paper discusses the protagonism expressed by immigrant women in religion via a series of leadership roles and expands on this theme by considering the pandemic as an emblematic period in which such female activism revealed itself. While the literature gives important details on gender inequalities generated by COVID-19, this article brings to attention agency, resilience and innovation. The case of catholic ethnic churches in Italy, a country particularly hit by the implications of COVID-19, is the empirical field. This paper uses qualitative data obtained through prolonged fieldwork (2018–2022), allowing to discuss the role of ethnic churches before and after the pandemic. The empowerment processes of women in religion and their leading role in terms of welfare provision and activism are detailed, concluding by considering the implications of these. While public institutions were in trouble, religious minorities, and notably their female members, acted to ensure the survival of non-Italian citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the benefits both individuals and collectivity have achieved over the past few years thanks to Mobility-as-Service (MaaS) systems, various studies were conducted to predict the level of acceptance of MaaS bundles from different territorial scales and in different countries. Results obtained are in some cases contradictory. Literature is lacking in the study of small-to-medium-sized urban contexts and in the effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to understand (1) what factors influence respondents' preferences between their usual transportation means and a possible MaaS alternative and (2) what leads a user to prefer one MaaS bundle to another. A logistic regression and a mixed logit model were developed to reach the two aims, respectively. These models were calibrated using questionnaires administered to employees of the Municipality of Padua, a medium-sized city in Italy. Aspects concerning the perception of health safety in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic were included in the analyses. In 37% of the cases, users stated they would be willing to adopt at least one of the proposed MaaS bundles. The results suggest that MaaS solutions can be a useful tool for managing mobility even in medium-sized cities, provided users' biosecurity concerns are addressed by appropriate countermeasures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing disruptive effects on the healthcare systems, economy and social life of countries all over the world. Even though the elder portion of the population is the most severely affected by the COVID-19 disease, the counter-measures introduced so far by governments took into little account the age structure, with restrictions that act uniformly on the population irrespectively of age. In this paper, we introduce a SIRD model with age classes for studying the impact on the epidemic evolution of lockdown policies applied heterogeneously on the different age groups of the population. The proposed model is then applied to age-stratified COVID-19 Italian data. The simulation results suggest that control measures focused to specific age groups may bring benefits in terms of reduction of the overall mortality rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early warning tools are crucial for the timely application of intervention strategies and the mitigation of the adverse health, social and economic effects associated with outbreaks of epidemic potential such as COVID-19. This paper introduces, the Epidemic Volatility Index (EVI), a new, conceptually simple, early warning tool for oncoming epidemic waves. EVI is based on the volatility of newly reported cases per unit of time, ideally per day, and issues an early warning when the volatility change rate exceeds a threshold. Data on the daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 are used to demonstrate the use of EVI. Results from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy and New York State are presented here, based on the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19, from January 22, 2020, until April 13, 2021. Live daily updated predictions for all world countries and each of the United States of America are publicly available online. For Italy, the overall sensitivity for EVI was 0.82 (95% Confidence Intervals: 0.75; 0.89) and the specificity was 0.91 (0.88; 0.94). For New York, the corresponding values were 0.55 (0.47; 0.64) and 0.88 (0.84; 0.91). Consecutive issuance of early warnings is a strong indicator of main epidemic waves in any country or state. EVI's application to data from the current COVID-19 pandemic revealed a consistent and stable performance in terms of detecting new waves. The application of EVI to other epidemics and syndromic surveillance tasks in combination with existing early warning systems will enhance our ability to act swiftly and thereby enhance containment of outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the pattens of international collaboration by analysing publications on COVID‐19 published in the first 6 months of the pandemic. The data set comprised articles on COVID‐19 indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) downloaded four times between 1 April 2020 and 1 June 2020. The analysis of 5,827 documents revealed that 128 countries, 23,127 authors, and 6,349 institutes published on the pandemic. The data reveal that the three main publishing countries were the USA, China, and England with Italy closely following. Although publication was widely spread, most of the institutions with the highest volume of output were in China. Network analysis showed growth in international cooperation with an average degree of country/region cooperation rising to 23.06 by 1 June. There was also a clear core‐periphery structure to international collaboration. Institutional collaboration was shown to be highly regionalized. The data reveal a high and growing incidence of international collaboration on the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2019 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had a big impact in Italy, mainly concentrated in the northern part of the Country. All this was mainly due to similarities of this area with Wuhan in Hubei Province, according to geographical, environmental and socio-economic points of view. The basic hypothesis of this research was that the presence of atmospheric pollutants can generate stress on health conditions of the population and determine pre-conditions for the development of diseases of the respiratory system and complications related to them. In most cases the attention on environmental aspects is mainly concentrated on pollution, neglecting issues such as land management which, in some way, can contribute to reducing the impact of pollution. The reduction of land take and the decrease in the loss of ecosystem services can represent an important aspect in improving environmental quality. In order to integrate policies for environmental change and human health, the main factors analyzed in this paper can be summarized in environmental, climatic and land management. The main aim of this paper was to produce three different hazard scenarios respectively related to environmental, climatic and land management-related factors. A Spatial Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been applied over thirteen informative layers grouped in aggregation classes of environmental, climatic and land management. The results of the health hazard maps show a disparity in the distribution of territorial responses to the pandemic in Italy. The environmental components play an extremely relevant role in the definition of the red zones of hazard, with a consequent urgent need to renew sustainable development strategies. The comparison of hazard maps related to different scenarios provides decision makers with tools to orient policy choices with a different degree of priority according to a place-based approach. In particular, the geospatial representation of risks could be a tool for legitimizing the measures chosen by decision-makers, proposing a renewed approach that highlights and takes account of the differences between the spatial contexts to be considered - Regions, Provinces, Municipalities - also in terms of climatic and environmental variables. • COVID-19 had a big impact in Italy, mainly in the northern part of the Country. • Reduction of land take and ecosystem services' loss improve environmental quality. • Environmental, climatic and land management can be leveraged for pandemic policies. • Geospatial representation of risks is a useful approach to support decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]