COVID-19 and Older Adults. Lessons Learned from the Italian Epicenter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On March 13th, 2020, The World Health Organization effectively established that Europe is the new the COVID-19 pandemic world epicenter, as cases in Italy and other European nations soared. The numbers in Italy have climbed with over 80,000 cases as of March 25th, 2020 and with over 8000 deaths, placing Italy now as the country with the highest mortality rate. Importantly, older adults are particularly vulnerable to get severe illness, complications, and to have a higher mortality rate than any other age group. The clinical presentation in older adults with severe illness, in the experience from geriatricians in Lombardy, is described as quite sudden; patients can develop severe hypoxemia with the need of ventilation support in few hours. Geriatric syndromes are not a common form of presentation for COVID-19 in severe illness. It is suggested that stratification by frailty level may help to detect the most vulnerable, and decisions about healthcare resource prioritization should not be taken based only on age itself or previous diagnosis, such as having dementia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".