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This paper explores the proximity of local media to audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on a case study of Italian daily L'Eco di Bergamo combining two sets of data: a list of initiatives the newspaper took in 2019 and 2020 to be closer to audiences, and interviews shedding light on how staff viewed the paper's relationship with audiences during that time. An analysis of these two datasets shows that the pandemic increased the newspaper's proximity to audiences but did not fundamentally change the way in which it related with audiences, despite significant changes in journalists' work routines. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a conceptualization of proximity as a dynamic balance between three structuring dimensions (gatekeeping, social and commercial), with a focus on audiences as a plural figure determined by news organizations' strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the biological, socio-economic, and institutional factors shaping the individual risk of death during a major pre-industrial epidemic. We use a micro-demographic database for an Italian city (Carmagnola) during the 1630 plague to explore in detail the survival dynamics of the population admitted to the isolation hospital (lazzaretto). We develop a theoretical model of admissions to the lazzaretto, for better interpretation of the observational data. We explore how age and sex shaped the individual risk of death, and we provide a one-of-a-kind study of the impact of socio-economic status. We report an inversion of the normal mortality gradient by status for those interned at the lazzaretto. The rich enjoyed a greater ability to make decisions about their hospitalization, but this backfired. Instead, the poor sent to the lazzaretto faced a relatively low risk of death because they enjoyed better conditions than they would have experienced outside the hospital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The landscape–tourism nexus has been the subject of many scientific contributions that differ in nature and methodological approach. Beyond sectorial planning assessments and impact evaluations, which often fail to grasp this complex relationship, this paper draws on conceptual frameworks in the social sciences and humanities that define the nexus through the productive potential of mobilities, bodily presences and interactions to investigate tourist landscapes in pandemic times. More precisely, the blended concept of dwelling-in-motion is adopted to explore tourist landscapes as evolving constellations of intertwined places and practices of people engaging with empty spaces, redescribing their functions and values and defining new forms of proximity tourism. This study focuses on the Brenta Riviera in northeastern Italy between Padua and Venice—an extremely dense area in terms of landscape stratifications and an exemplary local case where the effects of COVID-19 restrictions have been reshaping physical orderings, social relations and cultural meanings. During the third wave of the pandemic in Italy, a mapping process based on an online survey collected significant georeferenced landscapes among visitors, residents and operators, unveiling multiple and often unexpected Riviera landscapes as expressions of changing attitudes and behaviours towards neighbouring places. Calling for intimate well-being or collective involvement, 'newcomers-on-the-move' have been blurring the lines between daily, recreational and tourist landscapes, leading to a reconsideration of who can be a tourist and what can be a tourist landscape in a (post-)COVID-19 world. From a tourism policy perspective, tracing these trajectories is one of the starting points for rethinking destination recovery and addressing sustainable goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper proposes a modelling approach to assess the cross-region and cross-sector economic impacts of the restrictions imposed by governments to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. The nationwide lockdown imposed in Italy during the first wave of the pandemic is used as a benchmark. However, the adopted approach allows an ex-ante assessment of alternative policy responses, in the event of successive pandemic waves, in order to rationalise the policy intervention and reach the best possible compromise between containing the risk of contagion and reducing economic losses. The used approach consists of a non-linear programming model based on a multiregional Input-Output (I-O) table, which guarantees greater flexibility than traditional I-O analysis. It is applied to estimate both direct and indirect losses of GDP and employment produced by alternative policy responses represented by general and differentiated lockdowns. The evidence deriving from the Italian experience shows a sort of learning process through successive waves based on the introduction of increasingly flexible and tailored policy responses to the pandemic. [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]

The COVID‐19 pandemic is a highly dramatic concern for mankind. In Italy, the pandemic exerted its major impact throughout the period of February to June 2020. To date, the awkward amount of more than 134,000 deaths has been reported. Yet, post‐mortem autopsy was performed on a very modest number of patients who died from COVID‐19 infection, leading to a first confirmation of an immune‐thrombosis of the lungs as the major COVID‐19 pathogenesis, likewise for SARS. Since then (June–August 2020), no targeted early therapy considering this pathogenetic issue was approached. The patients treated with early anti‐inflammatory, anti‐platelet, anticoagulant and antibiotic therapy confirmed that COVID‐19 was an endothelial inflammation with immuno‐thrombosis. Patients not treated or scarcely treated with the most proper and appropriate therapy and in the earliest, increased the hospitalization rate in the intensive care units and also mortality, due to immune‐thrombosis from the pulmonary capillary district and alveoli. The disease causes widespread endothelial inflammation, which can induce damage to various organs and systems. Therapy must be targeted in this consideration, and in this review, we demonstrate how early anti‐inflammatory therapy may treat endothelia inflammation and immune‐thrombosis caused by COVID‐19, by using drugs we are going to recommend in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of Catholic miraculous images during the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, focusing on the ways in which they have been used and the related rituals performed, especially involving movement, temporality, and nature. I take a multidisciplinary approach, based on a historical perspective, but enriched by the strong influence of anthropology and semiotics. An interesting focus emerges on the devotional practices, both online and, when possible, in presence, in which the miraculous power of historical images is rediscovered and sometimes re-elaborated in light of contemporary sensibilities. At the same time, the rituals performed by clergy constitute a complex negotiation, with the aim of imploring the miraculous power of the supernatural helper that the image represents. The devotees' idea of a miraculous power involved in the image is itself part of the representation of their power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a new method for successfully simulating the dynamics of COVID-19, experimentally focusing on the third wave. This method, namely, the Method of Parallel Trajectories (MPT), is based on the recently introduced self-organized diffusion model. According to this method, accurate simulation of the dynamics of the COVID-19 infected population evolution is accomplished by considering not the total data for the infected population, but successive segments of it. By changing the initial conditions with which each segment of the simulation is produced, we achieve close and detailed monitoring of the evolution of the pandemic, providing a tool for evaluating the overall situation and the fine-tuning of the restrictive measures. Finally, the application of the proposed MPT on simulating the pandemic's third wave dynamics in Greece and Italy is presented, verifying the method's effectiveness. [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 deals with the quantification of the different rates in epidemiological models from a function estimation framework, with the objective of identifying the desired unknowns without defining a priori basis functions for describing its behaviour. This approach is used to analyze data for the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy and Brazil. The forward problem is written in terms of the SIRD model, while the inverse problem is solved by combining the Levenberg–Marquardt method with Tikhonov regularization. A very good agreement was achieved between data and the calculated values. The resulting methodology is robust and very versatile, being easily applicable to other epidemiology models and data from other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 epidemic is the latest in a long list of pandemics that have affected humankind in the last century. In this paper, we propose a novel mathematical epidemiological model named SUIHTER from the names of the seven compartments that it comprises: susceptible uninfected individuals (S), undetected (both asymptomatic and symptomatic) infected (U), isolated infected (I), hospitalized (H), threatened (T), extinct (E) and recovered (R). A suitable parameter calibration that is based on the combined use of the least-squares method and the Markov chain Monte Carlo method is proposed with the aim of reproducing the past history of the epidemic in Italy, which surfaced in late February and is still ongoing to date, and of validating SUIHTER in terms of its predicting capabilities. A distinctive feature of the new model is that it allows a one-to-one calibration strategy between the model compartments and the data that are made available daily by the Italian Civil Protection Department. The new model is then applied to the analysis of the Italian epidemic with emphasis on the second outbreak, which emerged in autumn 2020. In particular, we show that the epidemiological model SUIHTER can be suitably used in a predictive manner to perform scenario analysis at a national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand how COVID-19 pandemic has changed radiology research in Italy. A questionnaire (n = 19 questions) was sent to all members of the Italian Society of Radiology two months after the first Italian national lockdown was lifted. A total of 327 Italian radiologists took part in the survey (mean age: 49 ± 12 years). After national lockdown, the working-flow came back to normal in the vast majority of cases (285/327, 87.2%). Participants reported that a total of 462 radiological trials were recruiting patients at their institutions prior to COVID-19 outbreak, of which 332 (71.9%) were stopped during the emergency. On the other hand, 252 radiological trials have been started during the pandemic, of which 156 were non-COVID-19 trials (61.9%) and 96 were focused on COVID-19 patients (38.2%). The majority of radiologists surveyed (61.5%) do not conduct research. Of the radiologists who carried on research activities, participants reported a significant increase of the number of hours per week spent for research purposes during national lockdown (mean 4.5 ± 8.9 h during lockdown vs. 3.3 ± 6.8 h before lockdown; p =.046), followed by a significant drop after the lockdown was lifted (3.2 ± 6.5 h per week, p =.035). During national lockdown, 15.6% of participants started new review articles and completed old papers, 14.1% completed old works, and 8.9% started new review articles. Ninety-six surveyed radiologists (29.3%) declared to have submitted at least one article during COVID-19 emergency. This study shows the need to support radiology research in challenging scenarios like COVID-19 emergency. • COVID-19 outbreak drastically impacted on Italian radiological research. • Most ongoing radiological trials have been stopped during the first national lockdown. • Italian radiologists spent even more time on radiology research during the lockdown. • Many COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 trials have been pushed forward during the lockdown. [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]

Situated at the interplay between ethnic politics, migration, border, and security studies, this contribution analyzes processes of securitization of borders in South Tyrol, an Italian province bordering Austria and Switzerland with a German- and Ladin-speaking population and a past of ethnic tensions. South Tyrol is considered a model for fostering peaceful interethnic relations thanks to a complex power-sharing system. However, the arrival of migrants from foreign countries and the more recent influx of asylum seekers have revitalized debates around the borders between South Tyrol/Italy and Austria and among South Tyrolean linguistic groups. The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought further complexity to the issue. I use the concept of securitization—the process through which an issue is considered as an existential threat requiring exceptional measures—in order to understand why and how borders become exclusionary and restrictive, shaping dynamics of othering. With this framework, the article explores how South Tyrolean borders have been subjected to (de)securitizing and resecuritizing moves in discourses and practices. In this way, I shed new light on debates on the articulation of borders and interethnic relations that are occurring due to recent international migration, consolidation of nationalist agendas, and the current 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]

• The effect of the lockdown due to COVID-19 on the Italian power system are discussed. • A critical analysis of the reduction in the Italian power consumption and electricity cost in 2020 is presented. • Some countermeasures against the effect of generation and load reduction are proposed. • A blockchain-based architecture for Demand Response is proposed as a countermeasure. The paper analyses the dramatic effects of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Italian power system, considering the impacts on load and generation, market issues and ancillary services provision. During the period between March and May 2020, the Italian scenario was considered as exemplary due to the large reduction of loads and thermal generation caused by the hard lockdown across the Country. Italy has experienced the most severe effects of pandemic in terms of increase of death rates and of pressure on the health system as well as severity of the countermeasures. As a domino effect, the total lockdown of one of the most industrialized countries in the world has created an emergency situation that has put a big stress on the power system, reducing the possibility for the system to recover under contingencies. The weakness of the system in such an extreme situation is analyzed in depth using open data, while some countermeasures for providing resilience to the power systems in such cases are analyzed in simulation. Two technologies are here considered as exemplary countermeasures for providing resilience to the Italian power system: Fast Frequency Response by Photovoltaic and Wind plants with rated power above 10 MVA and the massive implementation of Demand Response programs through Energy communities and aggregation using Blockchain technology. The simulations show, on one hand, that the frequency recovery under contingency seems compromised in the current situation and that the support from such innovative technologies can provide a significant relief bringing the operational features close to those before the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, antecedents and consequences of conspiracy beliefs are investigated in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. 618 individuals residing in different geographical area of Italy participated in the study. We found that perceived mortality rate of COVID-19 is positively associated with adherence to conspiracy beliefs and, in turn, with negative outcomes such as: (a) a reduced support for the measures taken to deal with the pandemic emergency, (b) a weaker feeling of guilt for the violation of anti-COVID-19 government rules, and (c) a stronger utilitarian stance which prioritizes economic over health-related outcomes of lockdown. Also, framing pandemic within the "natural order of things" – fundamental and implicit expectations concerning how life and the world should function – was expected to moderate the relationship between perceived mortality rate and conspiracy beliefs: we found this relationship to be weaker when people believe that pandemic falls into the "natural order of things". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]