Respiratory Infections News

The toll of COVID-19 in the U.S. would have been less catastrophic if primary care had been more involved in the initial response efforts, according to a report by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The CDC tweaked its guidance for people isolating with COVID-19, adding a recommendation for anyone who “wants to test” but stopping short of telling people that they should test.

An unpatented COVID-19 vaccine recently authorized in India and going into production in other countries could soon vaccinate more people globally than all the doses donated by the U.S. and other G7 countries, two of its developers said.

Women can get vaccinated against COVID-19 at any time during their pregnancy and still see significant benefits for themselves and for their children, according to a study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The CDC has backed two COVID-19 vaccine authorizations issued by the FDA but will wait to hear from advisors on whether to recommend booster shots for children aged 12 to 15 years.

The FDA on Monday amended an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to add a booster dose for children aged 12 to 15 years, citing a need to protect them from the omicron variant.

Unsurprisingly, many of our most-read stories in 2021 were about the COVID-19 pandemic. Stories about COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics were popular, especially those dealing with approvals, authorizations or recommendations.

In updated guidance, the CDC said that asymptomatic people with COVID-19 can isolate for 5 days instead of 10, followed by 5 days of wearing a mask around other people.

The American Thoracic Society published a new clinical practice guideline to aid physicians in the outpatient management of infants, children and adolescents with post-prematurity respiratory disease.

An early 3-day course of remdesivir lowered the risk for hospitalization or death among nonhospitalized patients at high risk for severe COVID-19 by 87%, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.