International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The principal objective of this article is to assess the possible association between the number ... more The principal objective of this article is to assess the possible association between the number of COVID-19 infected cases and the concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone (O3), atmospheric pollutants related to people’s mobility in urban areas, taking also into account the effect of meteorological conditions. We fit a generalized linear mixed model which includes spatial and temporal terms in order to detect the effect of the meteorological elements and COVID-19 infected cases on the pollutant concentrations. We consider nine counties of the state of New York which registered the highest number of COVID-19 infected cases. We implemented a Bayesian method using integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) with a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE). The results emphasize that all the components used in designing the model contribute to improving the predicted values and can be included in designing similar real-world data (RWD) models. We found only ...
Our objective in this work was to present a hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal model that allow... more Our objective in this work was to present a hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal model that allowed us to make spatial predictions of air pollution levels in an effective way and with very few computational costs.We specified a hierarchical spatiotemporal model, using the Stochastic Partial Differential Equations of the integrated nested Laplace approximations approximation. This approach allowed us to spatially predict, in the territory of Catalonia (Spain), the levels of the four pollutants for which there is the most evidence of an adverse health effect.Our model allowed us to make fairly accurate spatial predictions of both long- term and short-term exposure to air pollutants, with a low computational cost. The only requirements of the method we propose are the minimum number of stations distributed throughout the territory where the predictions are to be made, and that the spatial and temporal dimensions are either independent or separable.HighlightsWe show a hierarchical Bayes...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Background: The principal objective of this paper is to introduce an online interactive applicati... more Background: The principal objective of this paper is to introduce an online interactive application that helps in real-time monitoring of the COVID-19 pandemic in Catalonia, Spain (PandemonCAT). Methods: This application is designed as a collection of user-friendly dashboards using open-source R software supported by the Shiny package. Results: PandemonCAT reports accumulated weekly updates of COVID-19 dynamics in a geospatial interactive platform for individual basic health areas (ABSs) of Catalonia. It also shows on a georeferenced map the evolution of vaccination campaigns representing the share of population with either one or two shots of the vaccine, for populations of different age groups. In addition, the application reports information about environmental and socioeconomic variables and also provides an interactive interface to visualize monthly public mobility before, during, and after the lockdown phases. Finally, we report the smoothed standardized COVID-19 infected case...
1 Research Group on Statistics, Applied Economics and Health (GRECS), University of Girona, Spain... more 1 Research Group on Statistics, Applied Economics and Health (GRECS), University of Girona, Spain 2 CIBER of Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), Spain 3 Department of Statistics ‘G. Parenti’, University of Florence, Italy 4 Biostatistics Unit, ISPO Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, Florence, Italy 5 CRESA, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain 6 Department of Animal Health and Anatomy, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020
We evaluate the association between the variations in income and wealth, (both aggregate and spli... more We evaluate the association between the variations in income and wealth, (both aggregate and split between real estate and financial wealth), and self-perceived health in Spain using a longitudinal sample of individuals before and after the financial crisis. We estimated generalized linear mixed models, with a binomial response and a logistic link, for four waves of the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (two before and two after the crisis), adjusting for variables at the family and individual levels. We also controlled for familial and individual heterogeneity and for temporal trends. While an increase in wealth greatly increases the probability of younger individuals reporting better health, this is not the case for older individuals. Decreases in gross wealth are associated with decreases in the probability of declaring good/very good health only in families whose reference person is over 44 years old. We conclude that: (i) not just income but net wealth effects impact on the ...
Background: This manuscript describes the rationale and protocol of a real-world data (RWD) study... more Background: This manuscript describes the rationale and protocol of a real-world data (RWD) study entitled Health Care and Social Survey (ESSOC, Encuesta Sanitaria y Social). The study’s objective is to determine the magnitude, characteristics, and evolution of the COVID-19 impact on overall health as well as the socioeconomic, psychosocial, behavioural, occupational, environmental, and clinical determinants of both the general and more vulnerable population. Methods: The study integrates observational data collected through a survey using a probabilistic, overlapping panel design, and data from clinical, epidemiological, demographic, and environmental registries. The data will be analysed using advanced statistical, sampling, and machine learning techniques. The study is based on several measurements obtained from three random samples of the Andalusian (Spain) population: general population aged 16 years and over, residents of disadvantaged areas, and people over the age of 55. Dis...
This study examines how local population, tourists and farmers relate to rural landscapes, by exp... more This study examines how local population, tourists and farmers relate to rural landscapes, by exploring visual landscape preferences and the influence of everyday landscapes on the research subjects. Results point towards an immense variability in visual landscape preferences amongst user groups living in or visiting the study area (Plana de l’Empordà, Girona, Spain). Tourists rate grasslands at the top of their preference list, local residents prefer orchards, and farmers favour fields of irrigated herbaceous crops; showing, altogether, that the user's relationship with the landscape determines their visual preferences. Results show that farmers prefer agriculture dominated scenes while local residents and tourists prefer scenes with equilibrium between agricultural and natural elements. Likewise, the presence of margins is widely appreciated aesthetically by all respondents. Furthermore, results underline the importance of landscapes that are familiar to the respondents.
ABSTRACT The paper has three objectives: firstly, to evaluate how the extent of clustering in wil... more ABSTRACT The paper has three objectives: firstly, to evaluate how the extent of clustering in wildfires differs across the years they occurred; secondly, to analyse the influence of covariates on trends in the intensity of wildfire locations; and thirdly, to build maps of wildfire risks, by year and cause of ignition, in order to provide a tool for preventing and managing vulnerability levels. For these objectives we analysed the spatio-temporal patterns produced by wildfire incidences in Catalonia, located in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula. The methodology used has allowed us to quantify and assess possible spatial relationships between the distribution of risk of ignition and causes. These results may be useful in fire management decision-making and planning. The methods shown in this paper may contribute to the prevention and management of wildfires, which are not random in space or time, as we have shown here.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on population health not only through COVID-positive ... more The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on population health not only through COVID-positive cases, but also via the disruption of healthcare services, which in turn has impacted the diagnosis and treatment of all other diseases during this time. We study changes in all new registered diagnoses in ICD-10 groups during 2020 with respect to a 2019 baseline. We compare new diagnoses in 2019 and 2020 based on administrative records of the public primary health system in Central Catalonia, Spain, which cover over 400,000 patients and 3 million patient visits. We study the ratio of new diagnoses between 2019 and 2020 and find an average decline of 31.1% in new diagnoses, with substantial drops in April (61.1%), May (55.6%), and November (52%). Neoplasms experience the largest decline (49.7%), with heterogeneity in the magnitudes of the declines across different types of cancer diagnoses. While we find evidence of temporal variation in new diagnoses, reductions in diagnoses early in th...
Background While numerous studies have assessed the effects of environmental (meteorological vari... more Background While numerous studies have assessed the effects of environmental (meteorological variables and air pollutants) and socioeconomic variables on the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of them, however, have significant methodological limitations and errors that could call their results into question. Our main objective in this paper is to assess the methodological limitations in studies that evaluated the effects of environmental and socioeconomic variables on the spread of COVID-19. Main body We carried out a systematic review by conducting searches in the online databases PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus up to December 31, 2020. We first excluded those studies that did not deal with SAR-CoV-2 or COVID-19, preprints, comments, opinion or purely narrative papers, reviews and systematic literature reviews. Among the eligible full-text articles, we then excluded articles that were purely descriptive and those that did not include any type of regression model. We evaluated...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The heterogenous distribution of both COVID-19 incidence and mortality in Catalonia (Spain) durin... more The heterogenous distribution of both COVID-19 incidence and mortality in Catalonia (Spain) during the firsts moths of the pandemic suggests that differences in baseline risk factors across regions might play a relevant role in modulating the outcome of the pandemic. This paper investigates the associations between both COVID-19 incidence and mortality and air pollutant concentration levels, and screens the potential effect of the type of agri-food industry and the overall land use and cover (LULC) at area level. We used a main model with demographic, socioeconomic and comorbidity covariates highlighted in previous research as important predictors. This allowed us to take a glimpse of the independent effect of the explanatory variables when controlled for the main model covariates. Our findings are aligned with previous research showing that the baseline features of the regions in terms of general health status, pollutant concentration levels (here NO2 and PM10), type of agri-food i...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The principal objective of this article is to assess the possible association between the number ... more The principal objective of this article is to assess the possible association between the number of COVID-19 infected cases and the concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone (O3), atmospheric pollutants related to people’s mobility in urban areas, taking also into account the effect of meteorological conditions. We fit a generalized linear mixed model which includes spatial and temporal terms in order to detect the effect of the meteorological elements and COVID-19 infected cases on the pollutant concentrations. We consider nine counties of the state of New York which registered the highest number of COVID-19 infected cases. We implemented a Bayesian method using integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) with a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE). The results emphasize that all the components used in designing the model contribute to improving the predicted values and can be included in designing similar real-world data (RWD) models. We found only ...
Our objective in this work was to present a hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal model that allow... more Our objective in this work was to present a hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal model that allowed us to make spatial predictions of air pollution levels in an effective way and with very few computational costs.We specified a hierarchical spatiotemporal model, using the Stochastic Partial Differential Equations of the integrated nested Laplace approximations approximation. This approach allowed us to spatially predict, in the territory of Catalonia (Spain), the levels of the four pollutants for which there is the most evidence of an adverse health effect.Our model allowed us to make fairly accurate spatial predictions of both long- term and short-term exposure to air pollutants, with a low computational cost. The only requirements of the method we propose are the minimum number of stations distributed throughout the territory where the predictions are to be made, and that the spatial and temporal dimensions are either independent or separable.HighlightsWe show a hierarchical Bayes...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Background: The principal objective of this paper is to introduce an online interactive applicati... more Background: The principal objective of this paper is to introduce an online interactive application that helps in real-time monitoring of the COVID-19 pandemic in Catalonia, Spain (PandemonCAT). Methods: This application is designed as a collection of user-friendly dashboards using open-source R software supported by the Shiny package. Results: PandemonCAT reports accumulated weekly updates of COVID-19 dynamics in a geospatial interactive platform for individual basic health areas (ABSs) of Catalonia. It also shows on a georeferenced map the evolution of vaccination campaigns representing the share of population with either one or two shots of the vaccine, for populations of different age groups. In addition, the application reports information about environmental and socioeconomic variables and also provides an interactive interface to visualize monthly public mobility before, during, and after the lockdown phases. Finally, we report the smoothed standardized COVID-19 infected case...
1 Research Group on Statistics, Applied Economics and Health (GRECS), University of Girona, Spain... more 1 Research Group on Statistics, Applied Economics and Health (GRECS), University of Girona, Spain 2 CIBER of Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), Spain 3 Department of Statistics ‘G. Parenti’, University of Florence, Italy 4 Biostatistics Unit, ISPO Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, Florence, Italy 5 CRESA, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain 6 Department of Animal Health and Anatomy, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020
We evaluate the association between the variations in income and wealth, (both aggregate and spli... more We evaluate the association between the variations in income and wealth, (both aggregate and split between real estate and financial wealth), and self-perceived health in Spain using a longitudinal sample of individuals before and after the financial crisis. We estimated generalized linear mixed models, with a binomial response and a logistic link, for four waves of the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (two before and two after the crisis), adjusting for variables at the family and individual levels. We also controlled for familial and individual heterogeneity and for temporal trends. While an increase in wealth greatly increases the probability of younger individuals reporting better health, this is not the case for older individuals. Decreases in gross wealth are associated with decreases in the probability of declaring good/very good health only in families whose reference person is over 44 years old. We conclude that: (i) not just income but net wealth effects impact on the ...
Background: This manuscript describes the rationale and protocol of a real-world data (RWD) study... more Background: This manuscript describes the rationale and protocol of a real-world data (RWD) study entitled Health Care and Social Survey (ESSOC, Encuesta Sanitaria y Social). The study’s objective is to determine the magnitude, characteristics, and evolution of the COVID-19 impact on overall health as well as the socioeconomic, psychosocial, behavioural, occupational, environmental, and clinical determinants of both the general and more vulnerable population. Methods: The study integrates observational data collected through a survey using a probabilistic, overlapping panel design, and data from clinical, epidemiological, demographic, and environmental registries. The data will be analysed using advanced statistical, sampling, and machine learning techniques. The study is based on several measurements obtained from three random samples of the Andalusian (Spain) population: general population aged 16 years and over, residents of disadvantaged areas, and people over the age of 55. Dis...
This study examines how local population, tourists and farmers relate to rural landscapes, by exp... more This study examines how local population, tourists and farmers relate to rural landscapes, by exploring visual landscape preferences and the influence of everyday landscapes on the research subjects. Results point towards an immense variability in visual landscape preferences amongst user groups living in or visiting the study area (Plana de l’Empordà, Girona, Spain). Tourists rate grasslands at the top of their preference list, local residents prefer orchards, and farmers favour fields of irrigated herbaceous crops; showing, altogether, that the user's relationship with the landscape determines their visual preferences. Results show that farmers prefer agriculture dominated scenes while local residents and tourists prefer scenes with equilibrium between agricultural and natural elements. Likewise, the presence of margins is widely appreciated aesthetically by all respondents. Furthermore, results underline the importance of landscapes that are familiar to the respondents.
ABSTRACT The paper has three objectives: firstly, to evaluate how the extent of clustering in wil... more ABSTRACT The paper has three objectives: firstly, to evaluate how the extent of clustering in wildfires differs across the years they occurred; secondly, to analyse the influence of covariates on trends in the intensity of wildfire locations; and thirdly, to build maps of wildfire risks, by year and cause of ignition, in order to provide a tool for preventing and managing vulnerability levels. For these objectives we analysed the spatio-temporal patterns produced by wildfire incidences in Catalonia, located in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula. The methodology used has allowed us to quantify and assess possible spatial relationships between the distribution of risk of ignition and causes. These results may be useful in fire management decision-making and planning. The methods shown in this paper may contribute to the prevention and management of wildfires, which are not random in space or time, as we have shown here.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on population health not only through COVID-positive ... more The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on population health not only through COVID-positive cases, but also via the disruption of healthcare services, which in turn has impacted the diagnosis and treatment of all other diseases during this time. We study changes in all new registered diagnoses in ICD-10 groups during 2020 with respect to a 2019 baseline. We compare new diagnoses in 2019 and 2020 based on administrative records of the public primary health system in Central Catalonia, Spain, which cover over 400,000 patients and 3 million patient visits. We study the ratio of new diagnoses between 2019 and 2020 and find an average decline of 31.1% in new diagnoses, with substantial drops in April (61.1%), May (55.6%), and November (52%). Neoplasms experience the largest decline (49.7%), with heterogeneity in the magnitudes of the declines across different types of cancer diagnoses. While we find evidence of temporal variation in new diagnoses, reductions in diagnoses early in th...
Background While numerous studies have assessed the effects of environmental (meteorological vari... more Background While numerous studies have assessed the effects of environmental (meteorological variables and air pollutants) and socioeconomic variables on the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of them, however, have significant methodological limitations and errors that could call their results into question. Our main objective in this paper is to assess the methodological limitations in studies that evaluated the effects of environmental and socioeconomic variables on the spread of COVID-19. Main body We carried out a systematic review by conducting searches in the online databases PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus up to December 31, 2020. We first excluded those studies that did not deal with SAR-CoV-2 or COVID-19, preprints, comments, opinion or purely narrative papers, reviews and systematic literature reviews. Among the eligible full-text articles, we then excluded articles that were purely descriptive and those that did not include any type of regression model. We evaluated...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The heterogenous distribution of both COVID-19 incidence and mortality in Catalonia (Spain) durin... more The heterogenous distribution of both COVID-19 incidence and mortality in Catalonia (Spain) during the firsts moths of the pandemic suggests that differences in baseline risk factors across regions might play a relevant role in modulating the outcome of the pandemic. This paper investigates the associations between both COVID-19 incidence and mortality and air pollutant concentration levels, and screens the potential effect of the type of agri-food industry and the overall land use and cover (LULC) at area level. We used a main model with demographic, socioeconomic and comorbidity covariates highlighted in previous research as important predictors. This allowed us to take a glimpse of the independent effect of the explanatory variables when controlled for the main model covariates. Our findings are aligned with previous research showing that the baseline features of the regions in terms of general health status, pollutant concentration levels (here NO2 and PM10), type of agri-food i...
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