“There have been no glitches so far,” said NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, MD, discussing a messenger RNA platform for producing viral antigens being developed by the National Institutes of Health in partnership with biotech company Moderna.
The Task Force offered assurance that things were largely status quo in the U.S., where the virus — known as 2019-nCoV — is still a low-level threat and is being contained with aggressive measures, including 14-day quarantines for some 800 passengers that have been evacuated from the Wuhan area.
The official U.S. case count stands at 12, though reports have surfaced that 11 Americans are among dozens diagnosed with the virus aboard a cruise ship off the coast of Japan.
CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD, said the agency had already screened 17,000 passengers coming in from flights from China, including an estimated 4,000 today. Worldwide, 31,530 cases have been reported, along with 638 deaths, the vast majority in Hubei province in China.
During the briefing, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD, said that so far the medical supply chain — which relies heavily on drugs and other goods produced in China — had been unaffected by the outbreak, but that could change.
In the U.S., the CDC has already started sending out coronavirus diagnostic kits to certified laboratories across the country and Fauci suggested that point-of-care antibody tests would be an important next step in order to perform broad sero-surveillance screening and better determine the scope of the outbreak.
The World Health Organization reported on Friday that among 17,000 cases of the novel coronavirus, 82% were mild, 15% severe, and 3% critical.
New data also emerged detailing the risk for hospital-acquired with the novel coronavirus and the demands on intensive care units (ICUs) at the epicenter of the outbreak.
The single-center series in JAMA included 138 consecutive patients hospitalized at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University with confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus from Jan. 1 to Jan. 28.
Most (88.9%) were treated with antiviral therapy, at least 64.4% received antibacterials, and a little less than half received glucocorticoid therapy (44.9%). Complications leading to ICU transfer included acute respiratory distress syndrome, arrhythmia, and shock. Patients landing in the ICU tended to be older (median 66 vs 51 years), have dyspnea (63.9% vs 19.6%) or anorexia (66.7% vs 30.4%), and a higher proportion had underlying comorbidities (72.2% vs 37.3%).
The study noted that all patients showed “bilateral patchy shadows or ground glass opacity in the lungs” on CT scans.
In all, six of the 138 patients died (4.3%). Median duration of hospital stay among the 47 discharged patients was 10 days. The remaining 85 patients were still hospitalized as of Feb. 3.
Study authors reported no conflicts of interest.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.