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Long-term care facilities have been widely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical evidence demonstrated that older people are the most impacted and are at higher risk of mortality after being infected. Regularly testing care facility residents is a practical approach to detecting infections proactively. In many cases, the care staff must perform the tests on the residents while also providing essential care, which in turn causes imbalances in their working time. Once an outbreak occurs, suppressing the spread of the virus in retirement homes (RHs) is challenging because the residents are in contact with each other, and isolation measures cannot be widely enforced. Regular testing strategies, on the other hand, have been shown to effectively prevent outbreaks in RHs. However, high-frequency testing may consume substantial staff working time, which results in a trade-off between the time invested in testing and the time spent providing essential care to residents.

Background: Long-term care facilities have been widely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical evidence demonstrated that older people are the most impacted and are at higher risk of mortality after being infected. Regularly testing care facility residents is a practical approach to detecting infections proactively. In many cases, the care staff must perform the tests on the residents while also providing essential care, which in turn causes imbalances in their working time. Once an outbreak occurs, suppressing the spread of the virus in retirement homes (RHs) is challenging because the residents are in contact with each other, and isolation measures cannot be widely enforced. Regular testing strategies, on the other hand, have been shown to effectively prevent outbreaks in RHs. However, high-frequency testing may consume substantial staff working time, which results in a trade-off between the time invested in testing and the time spent providing essential care to residents.Objective: We developed a web application (Retirement Home Testing Optimizer) to assist RH managers in identifying effective testing schedules for residents. The outcome of the app, called the “testing strategy,” is based on dividing facility residents into groups and then testing no more than 1 group per day.Methods: We created the web application by incorporating influential factors such as the number of residents and staff, the average rate of contacts, the amount of time spent to test, and constraints on the test interval and size of groups. We developed mixed integer nonlinear programming models for balancing staff workload in long-term care facilities while minimizing the expected detection time of a probable infection inside the facility. Additionally, by leveraging symmetries in the problem, we proposed a fast and efficient local search method to find the optimal solution.Results: Considering the number of residents and staff and other practical constraints of the facilities, the pro

Il contributo analizza la registrazione catalografica effettuata da Giovanni Morelli e Gustavo Frizzoni nel 1881 a Città di Castello

This chapter provides the country report on Italy with an analysis of the role the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan in boosting public investment up to and beyond 2026. Italy’s NRRP has more than 235 billion euros available for investments and reforms, making it one of the most remarkable modernization initiatives in the last seventy years. The impact of the NRRP is assessed and specific implementation challenges are highlighted, some of which have been caused by factors such as fragmented governance, a lack of effective monitoring, and compliance issues. Overcoming these difficulties is crucial for continuing to receive disbursements from the Commission. The effectiveness of its governance is examined. An open question is how to ensure a positive capital-spending trajectory in Italy (especially after 2026) in compliance with the new rules set out in the Stability and Growth Pact.

Developing new materials for the separation of gas mixtures is a key subject in setting up a circular economy. In this work, we report the synthesis and application of novel polymeric membranes, based on polymerized ionic liquids (PILs), to be used for CO2 separation from different gas pairs. Phosphonium-based PILs have been copolymerized within an original acrylate formulation that allowed the development of dense membranes able to overcome some of the main limitations related to ionic liquid membranes. Thereby, a collection of phosphonium ionic liquids has been investigated by evaluating the influence of the alkyl chain length and anion type on membrane structure and properties by employing a series of different chemo-physical characterization techniques. The membranes showed a marked preference toward CO2 permeation in the wet state, which simulates the conditions occurring with many CO2-containing gas streams, with two of the studied membranes exceeding the Robeson upper bound for the CO2/H2 gas pair.

Background: Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was proposed as potential treatment for COVID-19. Objective: We set-up a multicenter Italian collaboration to investigate the relationship between HCQ therapy and COVID-19 in-hospital mortality. Methods: In a retrospective observational study, 3,451 unselected patients hospitalized in 33 clinical centers in Italy, from February 19, 2020 to May 23, 2020, with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, were analyzed. The primary end-point in a time-to event analysis was in-hospital death, comparing patients who received HCQ with patients who did not. We used multivariable Cox proportional-hazards regression models with inverse probability for treatment weighting by propensity scores, with the addition of subgroup analyses. Results: Out of 3,451 COVID-19 patients, 76.3% received HCQ. Death rates (per 1,000 person-days) for patients receiving or not HCQ were 8.9 and 15.7, respectively. After adjustment for propensity scores, we found 30% lower risk of death in patients receiving HCQ (HR=0.70; 95%CI: 0.59 to 0.84; E-value=1.67). Secondary analyses yielded similar results. The inverse association of HCQ with inpatient mortality was particularly evident in patients having elevated C-reactive protein at entry. Conclusions: HCQ use was associated with a 30% lower risk of death in COVID-19 hospitalized patients. Within the limits of an observational study and awaiting results from randomized controlled trials, these data do not discourage the use of HCQ in inpatients with COVID-19.

In Chapter 4, G. Barbieri, F. Cerniglia, G. F. Gori, and P. Lattarulo provide a general overview of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) with a focus on the investment needs to ensure an ecological transition. The NRRP contains six missions, of which Mission 2 is specifically dedicated to the ecological transition (approximately 59.5 billion euros); however further resources for the transition are also available in other Missions under climate objectives. In total, the available resources are around 71.7 billion euros. This means that out of the total funding allocated to the NRRP (191 billion euros), 37.5% is dedicated to green investment, which is slightly above the minimum threshold set by the EU. In absolute terms, because of the size of the Italian NRRP, this is by far the most significant investment out of all the EU countries. The NRRP is a huge gamble for the future of Italy due to the sheer number of resources involved, the deep structural lags that must be overcome, and the major political consensus needed on the overall objectives and/or missions.

Software engineers form the CASUS Professional Support Team from diverse scientific backgrounds, including computer science, data science, and physics. With this team, the CASUS institute provides an appropriate setting for the sustainable and long-term development of scientific software, rather than being bound to the lifetime and funding of single projects. For a digital institute focused on a cross-domain exploration of complex systems – often only possible by computational means – putting software engineering at eye level with research ensures a reliable base of high-quality software. We emphasize open-source solutions, reusability, documentation, and portability, as well as on F.A.I.R. data. The Professional Support Team is involved in numerous in-house and cross-institutional projects: The scientific Python packages MALA and atoMEC are supported in the long term by code reviews, documentation generation, package management and continuous integration. The performance-portability framework Alpaka has given established physics simulations such as PIConGPU the chance to port to next-gen Exascale HPC systems such as ORNL Frontier. It is also used by emerging simulation and data analysis projects at CERN. The pandemic research platform Where2Test consists of several web applications linked to a central database containing current epidemiologic data. Predictions calculated on the HPC cluster are automatically post-processed and published online. Open software attracts collaboration, as the scientific I/O library openPMD-api shows, developed in collaboration between CASUS and LBNL and used by numerous scientific projects in Europe and America. With OPTIMA and PIONEER cloud-based platforms, the CASUS institute provides data access and analytic capabilities for researchers and pharmaceutical companies in a federated way. The poster shows the diverse skills found within the Professional Support Team, representing the interdisciplinary nature of CASUS, and briefly introdu

The COVID-19 pandemic has entered a new endemic phase with the recent, highly transmissible omicron variant. To navigate this transition, the Where2Test group develops an integrated suite of models, datasets, optimization algorithms, and user-friendly webapps to help users understand and manage SARS-CoV-2 infection risk in a range of different organizational settings. All of these applications are available on www.where2test.de.

L’Italia, negli ultimi 30 anni, ha sperimentato una forte crescita della popolazione immigrata, tanto che gli stranieri residenti, passati dai 625.000 del 1991 ai quasi 5,2 milioni del 2021, superano oggi l’8,8% della popolazione nazionale. Agli albori del fenomeno migratorio, la popolazione che entrava in Italia era costituita principalmente da giovani maschi in cerca di occupazione. Molti di loro, una volta sistemati nel paese, sono stati raggiunti dalle loro famiglie o ne hanno creata una nuova in Italia. Ciò ha contribuito, con il passare del tempo, a fare crescere anche il numero di giovani di origine straniera in età scolare che vivono nel nostro paese, sia perché immigrati al seguito delle madri che si ricongiungevano a mariti e compagni (immigrati di prima generazione), sia perché nati in Italia da genitori immigrati (immigrati di seconda generazione). Di conseguenza, l’immigrazione ha avuto un impatto rilevante anche sul sistema scolastico italiano, nel quale gli studenti stranieri sono passati dai 25.000 del 1991 agli oltre 860.000 del 2019. Questi studenti rappresentano oggi circa il 10% della popolazione scolastica complessiva, con una incidenza che varia dall’11,5% nella scuola primaria al 7,4% nella secondaria di secondo grado e che cambia molto tra contesti territoriali (Santagati e Colussi, 2020). anche quando si tenga conto delle caratteristiche personali e dei risultati scolastici, gli studenti stranieri di prima generazione hanno una minore probabilità di scegliere una scuola superiore liceale, che garantisce un più facile accesso all’università, rispetto ai loro colleghi italiani. La differenza rispetto agli italiani si riduce per gli studenti di seconda generazione, ma non si annulla del tutto. Inoltre, questa tendenza sembra più accentuata nel caso delle ragazze straniere, piuttosto che dei maschi. Abbiamo osservato che gli studenti stranieri, a parità di risultati conseguiti nei test Invalsi, ottengono dai loro insegnanti voti più ba