A study in JAMA Internal Medicine today demonstrates a sharp decline in US hospital COVID-19 mortality rates during the first 6 months of the pandemic, with wide variation across hospitals and poorer outcomes linked to higher county-level case rates.
A year after the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Boende, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 22.5% of healthcare workers (HCWs) had Ebola virus (EBOV) antibodies in their blood, even though only 15.1% reported contact with suspected, probable, or confirmed Ebola virus patients, according to a study today in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
After almost 6 months, 130 cases, and 55 deaths in Equateur province, the outbreak is officially over.
Sports cardiologists in JAMA Cardiology yesterday updated guidance for athletes returning to play (RTP) after COVID-19 infection. The authors recommended a risk stratification approach, with screening for cardiac injury only for athletes with severe disease or preexisting cardiovascular (CV) conditions.
Also, the DRC has gone 15 days without any new cases, and the WHO appoints two people to chair an investigation into sexual abuse allegations in the previous DRC outbreak.
A study shows four out of five people with recent loss of smell and/or taste tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies, and 39.8% of those did not have a cough or fever.
Domestic cats and dogs are susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). While both types of animals showed an immune response to the virus, only cats demonstrated viral shedding, and neither animal model showed evidence for a significant role in human infection, the study found.
Acute stress and depression rates rose in US adults as COVID-19 cases and deaths accumulated from mid-March to mid-April, largely related to preexisting mental and physical conditions and stressors such as job and wage loss, according to a study of 6,514 people from three large, nationally representative cohorts.
Live SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was isolated from air samples collected 2 to 4.8 meters (6.6 to 15.7 feet) away from two coronavirus patients—one recently released and one newly admitted—in a single hospital room, according to a study published yesterday in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.
A group of experts from Stanford and Harvard universities, as well as the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, propose a new model for measuring direct, indirect, and excess deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, and they say relying solely on death certificates likely undercounts the true death toll COVID-19 has taken in the United States. Their proposal is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
