Publications by authors named "Anastasia Chatzilena"
Despite the progress in medical data collection the actual burden of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown due to under-ascertainment of cases. This was apparent in the acute phase of the pandemic and the use of reported deaths has been pointed out as a more reliable source of information, likely less prone to under-reporting. Since daily deaths occur from past infections weighted by their probability of death, one may infer the total number of infections accounting for their age distribution, using the data on reported deaths.
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- Lower Respiratory Tract Infections (LRTI) are particularly risky for older adults, who often show atypical symptoms that can lead to underdiagnosis compared to younger patients.
- A study conducted in Bristol, UK, found that older adults (≥65 years) were significantly less likely to meet standard symptom-based case definitions for LRTI, even when confirmed cases were present.
- The symptom profiles for older patients often lacked common indicators like fever and cough, suggesting that current screening protocols may not effectively identify LRTI in older and more vulnerable individuals.
Multiplex panel tests identify many individual pathogens at once, using a set of component tests. In some panels the number of components can be large. If the panel is detecting causative pathogens for a single syndrome or disease then we might estimate the burden of that disease by combining the results of the panel, for example determining the prevalence of pneumococcal pneumonia as caused by many individual pneumococcal serotypes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackgroundUnderstanding the relative vaccine effectiveness (rVE) of new COVID-19 vaccine formulations against SARS-CoV-2 infection is a public health priority. A precise analysis of the rVE of monovalent and bivalent boosters given during the 2022 spring-summer and autumn-winter campaigns, respectively, in a defined population remains of interest.AimWe assessed rVE against hospitalisation for the spring-summer (fourth vs third monovalent mRNA vaccine doses) and autumn-winter (fifth BA.
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- A study evaluated the effectiveness of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine in reducing severity of COVID-19, focusing on hospitalisation and related health outcomes in adults during the Delta and Omicron periods.
- In total, 935 controls and 546 COVID-19 cases were analyzed, revealing varying vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and other serious health indicators, with differences noted between the Delta and Omicron variants.
- The findings suggest that BNT162b2 significantly lowers the risk of severe illness from COVID-19, particularly in older adults, highlighting its importance in high-risk groups.
This paper is concerned with the application of recent statistical advances to inference of infectious disease dynamics. We describe the fitting of a class of epidemic models using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and variational inference as implemented in the freely available Stan software. We apply the two methods to real data from outbreaks as well as routinely collected observations.
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