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A large proportion of US COVID-19 patients were left with thousands of dollars of hospital bills after many health insurers stopped issuing cost-sharing waivers in early 2021, finds a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open.
Isolation beds at public hospitals have reached 90% capacity in Hong Kong, with 2,000 new cases reported.
Signs of vagus nerve dysfunction in long COVID patients include difficulty breathing and problems swallowing.
New daily cases fell 42% in the past week, deaths fell 6%, and hospitalizations fell 19%, while Americans are split on mask mandates.
Confirmation of the H5N1 strain comes after the virus was detected last week at an Indiana turkey farm.
An active laboratory- and population-based surveillance study conducted at five US sites found a high incidence of infections caused by extended-spectrum beta-lactamase–producing Enterobacterales (ESBL-E), researchers reported today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.
People who received a different brand of COVID-19 vaccine booster than they did in the primary series had lower rates of infection than those who received the same brand, according to a study in Singapore published late last week in JAMA.
Rural counties with low COVID-19 vaccination rates had 2.4 times the risk of infection.
Also, protection against serious Omicron illness drops by 4 months after a third dose but is still high, new data show.
Prioritizing higher-volume prescribers for focused stewardship could have a big impact, study authors say.
Patients may not know about the drugs or don't want them.
A new study on outcomes among infants whose mothers received the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine in pregnancy showed that no detrimental outcomes were associated with maternal vaccination, including preterm birth, small birth weight for gestational age (SGA), congenital malformations, and infant death.
It was published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics.
Our weekly wrap-up of antimicrobial stewardship & antimicrobial resistance scans
An analysis conducted at hospitals in Michigan found that the more antibiotic stewardship strategies a hospital reported, the lower its overuse of antibiotics at discharge, researchers reported yesterday in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Upon approval, 10 million Pfizer vaccine doses will be ready to ship on Feb 21 and Feb 25.
Division 1 student athletes had about half the risk of testing positive in 2020-21.
A study conducted in San Francisco found that homeless residents were more than four times as likely to have group A Streptococcus (GAS) skin infections as people with stable housing, researchers reported yesterday in JAMA Dermatology.
A study in Qatar estimates that previous COVID-19 infection imparts 56% protection against future symptomatic infection caused by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, down from about 90% for other SARS-CoV-2 strains.
The study, published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), was led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar in Doha.
"We are encouraged by current trends, but we are not there yet."
A coalition is pushing the nation's largest fast-food chain to cut the antibiotics used in its beef.
