Respiratory Infections News

In late March, the FDA authorized emergency use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. It later approved an abbreviated new drug application for the drug in response to a surge in demand.

As deaths from COVID-19 increase to more than 100,000 in the United States, institutions around the world are working to develop an effective vaccine. Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle is conducting a phase 1 clinical trial to assess an investigational vaccine, while Johnson & Johnson plans to initiate human clinical studies for its potential candidate by September.

The United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Germany and Italy have proposed using “immunity passports” as a potential strategy for easing physical distancing measures, according to a paper published in The Lancet. However, a bioethics expert told Healio Primary Care that there are too many barriers for governments to implement them.

Patients who died from COVID-19-associated respiratory failure had more intussusceptive angiogenesis in their lungs than those who died from influenza, according to an autopsy study.

Patients with COVID-19 who were also HIV-positive experienced a similar risk for severe disease, ICU admission and death due to COVID-19 compared with the general population, according to the results of a single-center study conducted in Italy.

The NIH recently launched a multipronged study to investigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic during and after pregnancy, according to a press release.

Tuberculosis among pregnant women in Ethiopia independently correlated with HIV infection and increasing age, which suggests that young women in the country are continuously exposed to, and infected with, contagious TB, according to findings in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

At least 80 million children aged younger than 1 year could miss routine vaccinations because of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO and other groups warned today.

The WHO reported the largest single-day increase in cases of COVID-19 this week, with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, MSc, emphasizing that countries have “a long way to go in this pandemic” at a press briefing. As states throughout the country and cities around the world begin to reopen, in spite of the ongoing increases in COVID-19 cases and deaths, many have begun wondering what the end of the pandemic could potentially look like.

Use of prone positioning is feasible and may yield improvements in some patients with COVID-19 who are receiving noninvasive respiratory support, according to two research letters published in JAMA.