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This letter describes a cohort of 100 children younger than 18 years of age with RT-PCR-confirmed Covid-19 who were assessed in 17 pediatric emergency departments in Italy. The descriptive results are compared with previously published results involving children in China and the United States.

Detailed data on clinical presentations and outcomes of children with COVID-19 in Europe are still lacking. In this descriptive study, we report on 130 children with confirmed COVID-19 diagnosed by 28 centers (mostly hospitals), in 10 regions in Italy, during the first months of the pandemic. Among these, 67 (51.5%) had a relative with COVID-19 while 34 (26.2%) had comorbidities, with the most frequent being respiratory, cardiac, or neuromuscular chronic diseases. Overall, 98 (75.4%) had an asymptomatic or mild disease, 11 (8.5%) had moderate disease, 11 (8.5%) had a severe disease, and 9 (6.9%) had a critical presentation with infants below 6 months having significantly increased risk of critical disease severity (OR 5.6, 95% CI 1.3 to 29.1). Seventy-five (57.7%) children were hospitalized, 15 (11.5%) needed some respiratory support, and nine (6.9%) were treated in an intensive care unit. All recovered.Conclusion:This descriptive case series of children with COVID-19, mostly encompassing of cases enrolled at hospital level, suggest that COVID-19 may have a non-negligible rate of severe presentations in selected pediatric populations with a relatively high rates of comorbidities. More studies are needed to further understand the presentation and outcomes of children with COVID-19 in children with special needs. What is Known:• There is limited evidence on the clinical presentation and outcomes of children with COVID-19 in Europe, and almost no evidence on characteristics and risk factors of severe cases. What is New:• Among a case series of 130 children, mostly diagnosed at hospital level, and with a relatively high rate (26.2%) of comorbidities, about three-quarter had an asymptomatic or mild disease.• However, 57.7% were hospitalized, 11.5% needed some respiratory support, and 6.9% were treated in an intensive care unit.

My dissertation explores the relationship between personal ties and the political in the context of the Israeli military occupation and settler colonization of the West Bank. Based on a fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2014 in a Palestinian village under complete Israeli control, my methodological choice focused on an ethnography of Palestinians’ everyday life in order to grasp the moral and affective dimensions in which social relationships are embedded. The research questions how a moral economy of friendship, regulating personal relationships between distinguished populations, emerged from the Palestinians’ work experience in a colonial context. In the first chapter I introduce the context of my fieldwork focusing on the social identity of fellāḥīn (peasants) through which Palestinians in the village represent themselves. Peasants’ narratives and memories are linked to Palestinians’ violent dispossession due to the creation of the Israeli State, but also reveal present fractures in the Palestinian society. In the context of the progressive expansion of the Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank, agriculture has become a political practice claiming the Palestinian ownership over the land. I analyze such a politization through the different ways Palestinian agriculture has been appropriated by both Palestinian and Israeli activists in the public arena, showing the conjuncture and disjuncture of emerging political subjectivities. Given the structural dismantlement of Palestinian peasants’ life, the second chapter focuses on Palestinian labor in Israel as an apparatus of the Israeli colonial governamentality. In the context of the Palestinians’ growing economical dependence on Israel since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a special attention is dedicated to Palestinian laborers’ experience. I examine labor through three dimensions: work values in the Palestinian domestic economy, where norms regulating masculinity are explored in details; labor as an apparatus through which Israel controls the Palestinian population reproducing relations of personal dependence among Palestinian men and between Palestinians and Israelis, taking into account the institutional context inaugurated by the Oslo Agreements; Palestinians’ moral subjectivation through work, highlighting its contingent character in structurally uncertain political conditions. In the third chapter I go deeper into questioning personal relationships and their relation to the political. The social language of “friendship” is examined through the articulation of language with social practices in everyday life. Different ethnographical cases concerning personal ties between Palestinians and Israelis are presented, showing how “friendship” can be differently thought and mobilized in relation to moral and political values. Ultimately, such personal relations are framed by the perceived fragility of social relationships in the Palestinian society today. On the basis of Palestinians’ moral and political distinctions, in the fourth chapter I question “life” as the core of the political in Palestinian daily experience. In the tension between social death and the quest for a “respectable life”, the normalization of Palestinians’ death produced by the Israeli security regime engenders a “politics of life” which redefines life beyond physical survival.