The aim of this study was to estimate the incidence of COVID-19 disease in the French national population of dialysis patients, their course of illness and to identify the risk factors associated with mortality. Our study included all patients on dialysis recorded in the French REIN Registry in April 2020. Clinical characteristics at last follow-up and the evolution of COVID-19 illness severity over time were recorded for diagnosed cases (either suspicious clinical symptoms, characteristic signs on the chest scan or a positive reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) for SARS-CoV-2. A total of 1,621 infected patients were reported on the REIN registry from March 16th, 2020 to May 4th, 2020. Of these, 344 died. The prevalence of COVID-19 patients varied from less than 1% to 10% between regions. The probability of being a case was higher in males, patients with diabetes, those in need of assistance for transfer or treated at a self-care unit. Dialysis at home was associated with a lower probability of being infected as was being a smoker, a former smoker, having an active malignancy, or peripheral vascular disease. Mortality in diagnosed cases (21%) was associated with the same causes as in the general population. Higher age, hypoalbuminemia and the presence of an ischemic heart disease were statistically independently associated with a higher risk of death. Being treated at a selfcare unit was associated with a lower risk. Thus, our study showed a relatively low frequency of COVID-19 among dialysis patients contrary to what might have been assumed.

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SUMMARYWe consider a multi-beam Ka-band satellite communication system aimed at operating in emergency situations where terrestrial communications systems are no longer effective. In contrast to most systems which use one single beam to cover a large area, we study here the feasibility of a one beam per user concept, where a beamformer is calculated for each user. This should allow to guarantee the maximum antenna gain towards each user. We assess the performance of the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer and of a beamformer using a training sequence in realistic scenarios including channel, steering vector and synchronisation errors. We show that both beamformers provide a sufficiently high output signal to noise ratio in a DVB-RCS system.

We consider in this paper the uplink slot assignment problem in a multi-spot geostationary satellite. Radio interference impose constraints on the slots that can simultaneously be assigned in different cells that have the same frequency. The problem is shown to be an NP-complete one, which motivates us to search for a heuristic solution approach. We describe here a heuristic solution based on simulated annealing. We further investigate how to improve the performance of the simulated annealing and the rate of convergence of the annealing. Numerical experimentations are provided to test our proposed improvements.

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