Latest healthcare news
How do we assess the number of COVID-19 Deaths?
An interesting preprint in medRxiv published January 2021 looked at this question. Factors such as non-uniform definitions of mortality, uncertainty in diseases prevalence, and bias sampling complicates the quantification of fatality during an epidemic. ...
Long Covid
COVID-19 seems to be a multisystem disease, sometimes occurring after a relatively mild acute illness. Clinical management requires whole patient perspective. This relates to patients who have a delayed recovery from an episode of COVID-19 who were managed in the...
FACE Masks, Which Ones Should We Wear and Can We Wear Coverings Made From Household Fabrics?
An interesting article published in the Journal of M1 by Guha and others January 13, 2021. Face coverings constitute an important strategy for containing pandemics. Infection from airborne respiratory viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can occur in at least...
What Proportion of Coronavirus Disease COVID-19 Spread is Associated with Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from Persons with no Symptoms?
An interesting study by Johansson and others published in the Journal of American Medical Association January 7, 2021 explored this question. This study assessed the relative amount of transmission from presymptomatic, never symptomatic and...
Does Previous Exposure To COVID-19 Mean That You Can Still Carry the Virus and Be An Asymptomatic Transmitter?
Public Health England published a press release on 14 January 2021 which suggested that past COVID-19 infection provides some immunity, but people may still carry and transmit the virus. The study found that past COVID-19 infection provides...
Mental Health and Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic
An interesting article published in medRxiv January 2020 looked at the evidence as a preprint to determine the rates and predictors of uptake of formal and informal mental health support. The COVID-19 pandemic has put a great strain on people's mental...
What Proportion of COVID-19 Spread is Associated with the Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from Persons with No Symptoms?
An interesting article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at this important subject. SARS-CoV-2 is readily transmitted person to person. Optimal control of COVID-19 depends on direct resources and health messaging to ...
What is Better, Nasopharyngeal Swabs or Saliva for the Sensitivity of Testing for SARS-CoV-2 Infection?
An interesting article published by Bastos and others in the Annals of Internal Medicine investigated this issue. Nasopharyngeal swabs are the primary sampling method used for the detection of SARS-CoV-2, but they are better performed by a...
On the Coronavirus Vaccination
The Daily Telegraph provided a very intuitive synopsis on the Oxford, Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Presently, the largest mass vaccination programme in British history is underway, with the target of millions of vaccinations being administered by spring...
Advice on priority groups of COVID-19 vaccination from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation published 30 December 2020.
They considered all two current vaccinations and these were their findings. Pfizer-BioNTechThe committee reviewed published and unpublished phase one, two and three safety and efficacy data for the Pfizer BioNTech mRNA vaccine. They found that the vaccine appeared...
