Latest healthcare news
Vaccines and COVID-19
Pfizer-BioNTech announced last week that the efficacy portion of their COVID-19 vaccine trial had been completed. The vaccine prevented 95% of cases of the disease. Professor Stebbings in his daily report evaluated results and suggested that they looked a bit better...
An Interesting New Approach to the Treatment of Patients Admitted to Hospital with COVID-19
An article published November 12 in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine by Monk and others looked at the efficacy and safety of inhaled nebulised interferon beta-1a for the treatment of patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19. They did a randomised, double blind,...
Vaccines – What Factors will be Associated with the Likelihood of Adults Accepting COVID-19 Vaccination?
An interesting article published in The Journal of the American Medical Association open network by Sarah Kreps and others in November 2020 looked at this key point. They argued that widespread public uptake of the vaccine is crucial to stem the pandemic and examined...
Aerosol Transmission and Infection Risk of COVID-19 in Indoor Environments
An interesting article published by Lelieveld and others in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health looked at this vexing issue. Their results substantiated that airborne transmission in the indoor environment is an important factor. They...
Mental Health and COVID-19
An interesting article published in The Lancet by Taquet and others November 9, 2020 look at the adverse mental health consequences of COVID-19, including anxiety and depression to evaluate whether there was an increased psychiatric risk from infection. They studied...
Social Media and Vaccine Hesitancy
Original research by Steven Wilson and Charles Wiysonge published in the BMJ Global Health looked at this intriguing question. They considered the threat posed by anti-vaccination efforts on social media to be critically important with the forthcoming need for...
Dentistry During COVID-19, What’s the Risk?
An interesting study published in the International Journal of Periodontics and Restorative Dentistry looked at the incidence of COVID-19 virus transmission in three dental offices as a six month retrospective study in America. SARS-CoV-2 has shown the ability to...
Vaccination and the Public’s Willingness to be Vaccinated
An interesting preprint in Medrxiv published September 2020 by Bell and others looked into this. The availability of a COVID-19 vaccine has been heralded as key to controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 vaccination programme’s success will rely on public...
Sex Differences in COVID-19 Case Fatality: Do We Know Enough?
An interesting comment in The Lancet Global Health published 5 November 2020 looked at this question. Dehingia and Raj suggested that global data indicates a higher COVID-19 case fatality rate amongst men over women. Most countries with available data...
Does SARS-CoV-2 RNA Recur Following Discharge from Hospital?
An interesting article published by Chen and others looked at the epidemiological and clinical findings of short term recurrence of SARS-CoV-2 by PCR positivity in 1282 discharged cases. They found that of 1282 discharged patients, 189, that is 14.74%, tested...
