ObjectivesThe relationship between infections or vaccine antigens and exacerbations or new onset of immune-mediated diseases (IMDs) has long been known. In this observational study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we evaluated the onset of clinical and laboratory immune manifestations related to COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.MethodsFour groups of patients were evaluated: A) 584 COVID-19 inpatients hospitalized from March 2020 to June 2020 and from November 2020 to May 2021; B) 135 outpatients with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, assessed within 6 months of recovery; C) outpatients with IMDs in remission and flared after SARS-COV-2 infection; D) outpatients with symptoms of probable immune-mediated origin after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.ResultsIn cohort A we observed n. 28 (4.8%) arthralgia/myalgia, n. 2 (0.3%) arthritis, n. 3 (0.5%) pericarditis, n. 1 (0.2%) myocarditis, n. 11 (1.9%) thrombocytopenia or pancytopenia, and in the follow up cohort B we identified 9 (6.7%) cases of newly diagnosed IMDs after the recovery from COVID-19. In all cases, serological alterations were not observed.In cohort C we observed n.5 flares of pre-existing IMD after SARS-COV2 infection, and in the cohort D n. 13 IMD temporally close with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in 8 healthy subjects (with clinical classifiable IMD-like presentation) and in 5 patients affected by an anamnestic IMD. Also in these latter cases, except in 2 healthy subjects, there were not found serological alterations specific of a classifiable IMD.ConclusionsThis study suggests that the interplay between SARS-CoV-2 and the host may induce complex immune-mediated reactions, probably induced by the anti-spike antibodies, in healthy people and IMD patients without specific serological autoimmunity. Moreover, our data suggest that the anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies generated by the vaccination may cause in healthy subjects’ clinical manifestations similar to well-definite IMDs. These findings support the hypothesis that SARS-Cov2 infection in COVID-19 induce an innate and adaptive immune response that may be both responsible of the symptoms correlated with the occurrence of the IMDs described in our study. And, in this context, the IMDs observed in healthy people in close temporal correlation with the vaccination suggest that the anti-Spike antibodies may play a key role in the induction of an abnormal and deregulated immune response.

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This paper deals with the problem of optimising bids and budgets of a digital advertising portfolio. We improve on the current state of the art by introducing support for multi-ad group marketing campaigns and developing a highly data efficient parametric contextual bandit. The bandit, which exploits domain knowledge to reduce the exploration space, is shown to be effective under the following settings; few clicks and/or small conversion rate, short horizon scenarios, rapidly changing markets and low budget. Furthermore, a Bootstrapped Thompson Sampling algorithm is adapted to fit the parametric bandit. Extensive numerical experiments, performed on synthetic and real world data, show that, on average, the parametric bandit gains more conversions than state of the art bandits. Gains in performance are particularly high when an optimisation algorithm is needed the most, i.e. with tight budget or many ad groups, though gains are present also in the case of a single ad group.