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Background : European vaccine effectiveness (VE) studies initiated and funded by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Commission (I-MOVE-COVID-19) include 38 hospitals across 13 European countries. Using a test-negative case–control design, we aimed to measure VE against hospitalisation due to COVID-19 in vaccination target group(s) overall and by vaccine product. Methods : Between 28 December 2020 and 06 June 2021, we recruited patients hospitalised with severe acute respiratory illness (SARI ; ECDC case definition). Cases were SARI patients, laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 positive by RT-PCR within 24 hrs of admission or within the previous 2 weeks. Controls were SARI patients who were RT-PCR negative for SARSCoV-2 at admission. We pooled available data received from 34 hospitals in eight countries, and estimated VE in those aged ≥65 years using logistic regression, adjusting for study site (as fixed effect), swab date, age and chronic condition. Results : We included 1, 670 SARI patients (1, 095 cases, 575 controls). Seventynine cases (7%) and 244 controls (42%) were vaccinated ; 73% (235/323) with Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine. Adjusted VE (aVE) for one and two doses of Pfizer–BioNTech was 69% (95%CI: 44–82) and 93% (95%CI: 85– 97), respectively (sample size was too small to estimate aVE by other vaccine products). For one dose of Pfizer–BioNTech, aVE was 73% (95%CI: 49– 86) in those aged 65–79 years and 64% (30–82) in those ≥80 years. For two doses in these age-groups, aVE was 97% (95%CI: 86–99) and 85% (95%CI: 66–94), respectively. Conclusions : Our results suggest good protection against severe COVID-19 conferred by one and two doses of Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine in adults ≥65 years.

In Europe, annual influenza vaccination is recommended to elderly. From 2011 to 2014 and in 2015-16, we conducted a multicentre test negative case control study in hospitals of 11 European countries to measure influenza vaccine effectiveness (IVE) against laboratory confirmed hospitalised influenza among people aged ≥65years. We pooled four seasons data to measure IVE by past exposures to influenza vaccination. We swabbed patients admitted for clinical conditions related to influenza with onset of severe acute respiratory infection ≤7days before admission. Cases were patients RT-PCR positive for influenza virus and controls those negative for any influenza virus. We documented seasonal vaccination status for the current season and the two previous seasons. We recruited 5295 patients over the four seasons, including 465A(H1N1)pdm09, 642A(H3N2), 278 B case-patients and 3910 controls. Among patients unvaccinated in both previous two seasons, current seasonal IVE (pooled across seasons) was 30% (95%CI: -35 to 64), 8% (95%CI: -94 to 56) and 33% (95%CI: -43 to 68) against influenza A(H1N1)pdm09, A(H3N2) and B respectively. Among patients vaccinated in both previous seasons, current seasonal IVE (pooled across seasons) was -1% (95%CI: -80 to 43), 37% (95%CI: 7-57) and 43% (95%CI: 1-68) against influenza A(H1N1)pdm09, A(H3N2) and B respectively. Our results suggest that, regardless of patients' recent vaccination history, current seasonal vaccine conferred some protection to vaccinated patients against hospitalisation with influenza A(H3N2) and B. Vaccination of patients already vaccinated in both the past two seasons did not seem to be effective against A(H1N1)pdm09. To better understand the effect of repeated vaccination, engaging in large cohort studies documenting exposures to vaccine and natural infection is needed. The Lithuanian I-MOVE+ study sites were supported by a grant from the Research Council of Lithuania (SEN-03/2015). The IMOVE+ project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 634446. GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur and Sanofi Pasteur MSD financially supported the InNHOVE network. They had no role in study design, data collection, pooled analysis, and publication. We are grateful to all patients, medical staff, study nurses and epidemiologists from the twelve study sites who actively participated in the study. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

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3D-Video systems allow a user to perceive depth in the viewed scene and to display the scene from arbitrary viewpoints interactively and on-demand. This paper presents a prototype implementation of a 3D-video streaming system using an IP network. The architecture of our streaming system is layered, where each information layer conveys a single coded video signal or coded scene-description data. We demonstrate the benefits of a layered architecture with two examples: (a) stereoscopic video streaming, (b) monoscopic video streaming with remote multiple-perspective rendering. Our implementation experiments confirm that prototyping 3D-video streaming systems is possible with today's software and hardware. Furthermore, our current operational prototype demonstrates that highly heterogeneous clients can coexist in the system, ranging from auto-stereoscopic 3D displays to resource-constrained mobile devices.

This paper presents a layered framework for 3D-TV applications, combining multiview and depth-image based approaches in a scalable fashion. To solve the problem of missing data due to disocclusions, we add specific layers for coded oc clusion data and the edge-mask information for high-quality 3D rendering of key objects in the scene. We show how the same framework can be extended towards FTV applications by jointly addressing simulcast and multicast transmission. By adopting a distributed delivery architecture, new interesting properties can be realized such as shared processing for the creation and streaming of virtual viewpoints. In an extensive system discussion, we conclude that it is possible to adaptively implement our streaming applications using a cross-layered approach. Similarly, the concept of selective reliability optimization can be introduced into our system.