Recent Publications

• Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Social Determinants of Health Issues of Marginalized Black and Asian Communities: A Social Media Analysis Empowered by Natural Language Processing.
  Whitfield Christopher, et al. Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities 2024 0 0.
  
• Immune response kinetics to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination among nursing home residents-Georgia, October 2020-July 2022.
  Chisty Zeshan A, et al. PloS one 2024 0 0. (4) e0301367
  
• Update on Omicron variant and its threat to vulnerable populations.
  Dai Bowen, et al. Public health in practice (Oxford, England) 2024 0 0. 100494
  
• Novel genetic association of the Furin gene polymorphism rs1981458 with COVID-19 severity among Indian populations.
  Pandey Rudra Kumar, et al. Scientific reports 2024 0 0. (1) 7822
  
• The impact of comorbidities and economic inequality on COVID-19 mortality in Mexico: a machine learning approach.
  Méndez-Astudillo Jorge, et al. Frontiers in big data 2024 0 0. 1298029
  
• SARS-CoV-2 mutant spectra as variant of concern nurseries: endless variation?
  Martínez-González Brenda, et al. Frontiers in microbiology 2024 0 0. 1358258
  
• The descriptive epidemiology of pre-omicron SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections and severe outcomes in Manitoba, Canada.
  Shaw Souradet Y, et al. Frontiers in epidemiology 2024 0 0. 1248847
  
• Social and demographic factors associated with receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine initial booster dose and with interval between primary series completion and initial booster dose uptake among persons aged ≥ 12 years, United States, August 2021-October 2022.
  Meng Lu, et al. Vaccine 2024 0 0.
  
• Molecular characterization of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron clade and clinical presentation in children.
  Scutari Rossana, et al. Scientific reports 2024 0 0. (1) 5325
  
• Next-generation treatments: Immunotherapy and advanced therapies for COVID-19.
  Arevalo-Romero Jenny Andrea, et al. Heliyon 2024 0 0. (5) e26423
  
• Utilizing cost-effective portable equipment to enhance COVID-19 variant tracking both on-site and at a large scale.
  Sung Yong Park et al. J Clin Microbiol 2024 2 e0155823
  
• The next chapter for Africa's genomic initiatives
  P Adepoujo, Lancet Id, March 2024
  
  From the article: " The Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative 2.0, launched at the end of 2023, plans to strengthen laboratory systems and enhance genomic capacity across Africa. With COVID-19 no longer a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the demand for SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequencing has reduced. In Africa, this has created an opportunity for the rapidly acquired capacity for genomics to serve other purposes. In 2019, only seven countries in Africa had functional next-generation sequencing capacity in public health laboratories according to the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Africa PGI), but this rapidly grew to 30 in 2023, with nine regarded as centres of excellence. By 2025, Africa PGI aims to increase the number to 50 through Africa PGI 2.0."
• Stacked deep learning approach for efficient SARS-CoV-2 detection in blood samples.
  Wang Wu, et al. Artificial intelligence in medicine 2024 0 0. 102767
  
• A New-fangled COVID-19 Variant, Eris, Might be the One to Lookout in 2023 or far from Over.
  Ray Suman Kumar, et al. Infectious disorders drug targets 2024 0 0.
  
• Predicting COVID-19 Outcomes: Machine Learning Predictions Across Diverse Datasets.
  Panç Kemal, et al. Cureus 2024 0 0. (12) e50932
  
• ACE I/D polymorphism is a risk factor for the clinical severity of COVID-19 in Brazilian male patients.
  Almeida Sandro Soares, et al. Molecular biology reports 2024 0 0. (1) 180
  
• Using big sequencing data to identify chronic SARS-Coronavirus-2 infections.
  Sheri Harari et al. Nat Commun 2024 1 (1) 648
  
  From the abstract: " We harnessed millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes to identify potential chronic infections and used language models (LM) to infer chronic-associated mutations. First, we mined the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny and identified chronic-like clades with identical metadata (location, age, and sex) spanning over 21 days, suggesting a prolonged infection. We inferred 271 chronic-like clades, which exhibited characteristics similar to confirmed chronic infections. Chronic-associated mutations were often high-fitness immune-evasive mutations located in the spike receptor-binding domain (RBD), yet a minority were unique to chronic infections and absent in global settings."
• Digital measurement of SARS-CoV-2 transmission risk from 7 million contacts.
  Luca Ferretti et al. Nature 2023 12
  
  From the abstract: "Here we analysed 7 million contacts notified by the NHS COVID-19 app6,7 in England and Wales to infer how app measurements translated to actual transmissions. Empirical metrics and statistical modelling showed a strong relation between app-computed risk scores and actual transmission probability. Longer exposures at greater distances had similar risk to shorter exposures at closer distances. The probability of transmission confirmed by a reported positive test increased initially linearly with duration of exposure (1.1% per hour) and continued increasing over several days. "
• Future direction for the deployment of deep learning artificial intelligence: Vision threatening disease detection in underserved communities during COVID-19.
  Vought Rita, et al. Saudi journal of ophthalmology : official journal of the Saudi Ophthalmological Society 2023 0 0. (3) 193-199
  
• Relative vaccine effectiveness of mRNA COVID-19 boosters in people aged at least 75 years during the spring-summer (monovalent vaccine) and autumn-winter (bivalent vaccine) booster campaigns: a prospective test negative case-control study, United Kingdom, 2022.
  Chatzilena Anastasia, et al. Euro surveillance : bulletin Europeen sur les maladies transmissibles = European communicable disease bulletin 2023 0 0. (48)