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Remember the Shortage of Medical Gowns During COVID? Feds Spending $350 Million for Stockpile
Six U.S. companies will spend at least $350 million to manufacture medical gowns to store in the Strategic National Stockpile, years after doctors and nurses working in hospitals found themselves without the equipment while COVID-19 raged.
The purchase of the gowns is one of the final steps toward shoring up the personal protective equipment in the stockpile after it was depleted just weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Equipment had not been regularly restocked in the years before the crisis began.
The new gowns are among the many purchases the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response has made in recent years to restock the emergency coffers, assistant secretary Dawn O’Connell said.
Study: Prolonged Antibiotics Common in COVID Patients With and Without Sepsis
Prolonged antibiotics were common in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with and without sepsis during the first 33 months of the pandemic, despite low rates of proven bacterial infection, researchers reported today in Antimicrobial Stewardship & Healthcare Epidemiology.
For the study, researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital analyzed electronic health record data for patients hospitalized for community-onset SARS-CoV-2 infections at five Massachusetts hospitals from March 2020 through Nov. 2022.
Their primary aim was to describe prolonged antibiotic use (four or more days of antibiotics within the first week following admission) in COVID-19 patients presenting with sepsis, which is primarily caused by bacterial infections and typically treated with antibiotics but can be triggered by viral pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2.
The study authors say the elevated ongoing rates of prolonged antibiotic prescribing for COVID-19 patients likely reflects concerns about possible bacterial co-infections.
“Our findings highlight an ongoing opportunity to improve antibiotic use in patients presenting with severe respiratory viral infections,” they wrote.
COVID-19 Human Challenge Study Highlights Small Changes to Memory and Cognition
A new analysis from Imperial’s human challenge study of COVID-19 has revealed subtle differences in the memory and cognition scores of healthy volunteers infected with SARS-CoV-2, which lasted up to a year after infection.
The researchers say all scores fell within expected normal ranges for healthy individuals and no one reported experiencing any lasting cognitive symptoms such as brain fog.
The findings, published in the journal eClinicalMedicine, show a small but measurable difference following highly intensive cognitive testing of 18 healthy young people with infection compared to those who did not become infected, monitored under controlled clinical conditions.
Covid Inquiry Told How Putting on PPE Delayed Treatment of Dying Patients
Dying patients experienced vital delays in being treated by paramedics because of the time it took ambulance crews to put on protective personal equipment, the Covid inquiry has been told.
An ambulance technician, Mark Tilley, came close to tears on Tuesday as he described how the experience still “played on his mind”.
Ambulance crews had been told they could not put on PPE before arriving at the scene and had to wait to put on plastic Tyvek suits and protective hoods or masks.
Tilley told the inquiry that the delays could cost crews vital minutes before they were able to start treatment.
“We could have actually been at the patient’s side a minute, minute and a half quicker in those really most serious cases,” he said.
COVID-Induced Immune Memory Could Protect Against Severe Cases of Flu, Mouse Study Suggests
More than 200 viruses can infect and cause disease in humans; most of us will be infected by several over the course of a lifetime.
Does an encounter with one virus influence how your immune system responds to a different one? If so, how? Does it weaken your defenses, boost them, or have some other impact altogether?
These are questions Rockefeller University scientists from the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease, headed by Charles M. Rice, and Weill Cornell Medicine’s Laboratory of Epigenetics and Immunity, headed by Steven Z. Josefowicz, teamed up to answer in a new study published in the journal Immunity.
By analyzing mice that had been first infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then with influenza A virus, the scientists found that having recovered from COVID-19 had a protective effect against the worst effects of the flu, and that this memory response was coming from an unexpected corner of the immune system.
High-Grade Masks Evidence Weak, Covid Inquiry Told
There is only “weak evidence” that high-grade face masks better-protected health workers than surgical ones in the pandemic, the Covid inquiry has been told.
Prof Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser at the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said respirator masks — known as FFP3s — may have performed no better than thin surgical masks in real-life situations.
She said there could be “significant harms” from wearing tight-fitting FFP3s, including blisters and breathing difficulties.
“If the evidence was strong that FFP3s really protected people, and we saw a definitive reduction [in infections], they would have been recommended,” she said.
Antiviral-Resistant Variants of SARS-CoV-2 Can Emerge in Immunocompromised People
Individuals with compromised immunity and persistent COVID-19 infections can harbor drug-resistant variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which have the potential to spread to the general population found researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine, the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In the study, published Sept. 18 in Nature Communications, researchers isolated drug-resistant strains of SARS-CoV-2 from people who had not cleared the virus after two to three months of infection and treatments with antiviral drugs.
One variant showed resistance to antivirals Paxlovid and remdesivir while another strain had mutations associated with a decreased sensitivity to remdesivir and a third antiviral drug, the monoclonal antibody sotrovimab.
