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Here are the highlights of this week’s pandemic.
The following are highlights of the loose newsletter, “Smart and Useful Science on COVID-19”. To get the daily newsletter numbers in your inbox, enter here. Please make a monthly contribution to help this newsletter.
This week, multiple media outlets covered clues and hypotheses that two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, most likely the ones being tested through Moderna and Pfizer on thousands of others, may be urgently approved in October or November through the U. S. federal government. Groups that are considered a priority to receive those vaccines include healthcare workers, essential workers, homeland security workers, other people 65 and older, Native Americans, prisoners and others of other racial categories. and ethnic. It is probably wise to heed the statements recently reported by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious disease official in the United States, on this subject. In a 9/1/20 article via Liz Szabo for Kaiser Health News, Fauci says that, in fact, a vaccine may be obtained “sooner than expected if ongoing clinical trials produce incredibly positive effects. ” An independent board called the Data and Safety Oversight Council has the strength to propose reducing vaccine trials if strong effects are found, Szabo reports. Fauci says he accepts as true with that advice to avoid political influence, as the story goes. And other people also deserve to accept the vaccine approval procedure as true, as the experimental knowledge behind any advice or resolution will be made public, Fauci said. Others cited in the article raise considerations about the premature termination of these large-scale efficacy and protection studies.
A number of new studies and an editorial, all published in the medical journal JAMA, suggested that affordable and widely available anti-inflammatory drugs called corticosteroids, especially dexamethasone, hydrocortisone and methylprednisolone, reduce the number of deaths in other people with severe COVID-19. , Roni Caryn Rabin reports to the New York Times (2/9/20). These anti-inflammatory compounds are simply called “steroids”, but they are not the same as anabolic steroids that can be misused by athletes. The World Health Organization will update its recommendation on COVID-19 remedy and vigorously propose corticosteroids for “seriously ill patients, but not for those with mild illness,” Rabin writes. the article read: “Clearly, steroids are now the popular treatment [for severe and critical COVID-19]. “Patients with COVID-19 die from an excessive immune reaction from the body to the virus, leading to inflammation, according to history: https://www. nytimes. com/2020/09/02/health/coronavirus-steroids. html.
My ears perked up about a month ago when an infectious disease pediatrician at a youth hospital told me that he had treated the first reported case of his rare multi-system inflammatory syndrome condition that affects some people. young people exposed to the new coronavirus. In the United States, the syndrome is known as MIS-C; it’s called PIMS in the UK and elsewhere. The pediatrician said it was difficult to figure out how to treat young people with MIS-C because there are no delightful colleagues to lean on who have extensive experience with the syndrome (COVID-19 is only about 8 months old, and doctors only described MIS) C at the end of April. I’m curious to know how doctors solve this challenge with this harmful disease, which is proving to be more fatal and potentially harmful to young people than COVID-19. MIS-C can cause long-term heart damage in young people. So I reported and wrote a short story for Scientific American about what is known so far about the diagnosis and remedy of MIS-C (9/1/20). Corticosteroids are among the remedies that some physicians have prescribed, however their true efficacy is unclear, as there are no randomized controlled trials to verify this and other remedies for MIS-C yet.
It is now well known that COVID-19 also damages the centers of many of its adult victims. In a 31/08/20 trial for Scientific American, Dr. Carolyn Barber of the emergency branch describes a similar phenomenon: new discoveries of life. Threatening center hurts in other people of all ages, adding in the past college athletes and healthy professionals, weeks or even months after an infection without symptoms with the new coronavirus. These patients suffer from myocarditis or inflammation of the center, which occasionally manifests as shortness of breath, increased central frequency, chest pain, fever or fatigue, Barber writes. The long-term effect can be significant, according to a cardiologist at the DZHK Center for Cardiovascular Imaging in Germany, cited (from an email) in the article. He writes: “My non-public opinion is that COVID will accumulate incidents of center failures in the coming decades. “Some instances themselves, depending on the story, however, the most productive defense at this time is not to contract the virus.
Detecting SARS-CoV-2 and then isolating those who test positive has been imperative in controlling the pandemic in many countries. In an in-depth article from The New Yorker (9/2/20), public fitness surgeon, writer, and researcher Atul Gawande lays out the quagmire of challenges that make it difficult to obtain such a check in the United States. of the solution, it gives a “national network”, as we have done for national electricity, “for the generation, transmission or distribution of our supply of checks. ” Currently, he notes, “the vast majority of inflamed Americans, adding those with symptoms, never get checked. ” To be effective in controlling outbreaks, the controls should be repeated at least once a week and, in all probability, daily, he reports. The challenge is not the lack of generation to verify, he says. It’s just that there hasn’t been a coordinated implementation to implement this entire generation well. Better logistics to manage billing systems, the flow of other people to check sites, and swabs, reagents and verification tube materials will be key to correcting the coronavirus verification in the United States, he writes. And increased logistics can also be the lockdowns that occur with the 4 companies that process the most control samples in the United States, Gawande writes. Some US labs may just take over, but no large components are being used lately, he reports. The article ends with a forecast of “one of the worst falls and winters in the history of the United States”, however, Gawande also highlights the advances in collaboration and communities doing things right, detecting that public aptitude is a component of care. fitness.
You may like Caroline Doyle and Ginny Hogan’s “Updated Guidelines on What not to use after Labor Day” for McSweeney (2/9/20).
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