Respiratory Infections News

Election and public health officials should collaborate to ensure that Americans are able to vote safely during the COVID-19 pandemic, an expert said.

The use of corticosteroids improved the odds that adults who are critically ill with COVID-19 would survive, according to data from four studies recently published in JAMA.

Less than 4% of about 3,400 close contacts of people with COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic in China were infected with SARS-CoV-2, researchers wrote in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Mass COVID-19 testing among staff and inmates at correctional and detention facilities in the U.S. led to a median 12-fold increase in known cases compared with symptom-based testing alone, according to data published in MMWR.

Among more than 3,200 frontline U.S. health care personnel, around 6% had evidence of a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection — but a high proportion of infections went previously undetected, researchers reported in MMWR.

Results showed that less than 1% of asymptomatic children routinely tested for SARS-CoV-2 at more than two dozen children’s hospitals in the United States were positive for the coronavirus.

Kentucky uses a tool that generates a daily score indicating how the state is performing against COVID-19, which could be used by other states to guide decision-making during the pandemic, researchers said in MMWR.

Adolescents and young adults who used both e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes were seven times more likely to acquire COVID-19, data show.

National Nurses United has called on the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, to inspect 17 hospitals that are owned and operated by HCA Healthcare and issue citations for “willful violation” of workplace safety hazards.

Two retrospective cohort studies published in Annals of Internal Medicine reinforce the notion that individuals with obesity are at greater risk for worse outcomes from COVID-19.