COVID Transmissions for 8-28-2020
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment.
It has been 284 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.
Housekeeping note:
Really a surprisingly small amount of COVID-19 news today, so I don’t have a lot to say except “have a good weekend!”
Glossary terms are bolded words with links to the running newsletter glossary.
Keep the newsletter growing by sharing it! I love talking about science and explaining important concepts in human health, but I rely on all of you to grow the audience for this:
Now, let’s talk COVID.
Case spike in India driving increase in global cases
CIDRAP continues to monitor the situation in India, which is bad: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/08/india-surge-pushes-global-covid-19-total-higher
New review links azithromycin + hydroxychloroquine to increased death
A new review paper published today looked at studies using azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19, and the results don’t look good: https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(20)30505-X/fulltext
This is a systematic review, which means that they developed a plan for searching for existing studies and combined their results to make a “meta-analysis.” The meta-analysis gives us a sense of how the overall pool of existing studies align with each other, and what the results would have looked like if they were all one big study. This approach allowed them to simulate a trial with the following arms: 11,932 participants for the hydroxychloroquine group, 8,081 for the hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin group and 12,930 for the control group.
The results were as follows:
There was no association of hydroxychloroquine with improved survival
There was an association of hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin with increased risk of death vs control
I think this is yet another piece of work to show that this combination isn’t a good idea.
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Working
With the conference on, it’s a busy week. I’m not getting a lot of downtime. Yes, same story as yesterday.
The conference is interesting, though! There is a virtual food truck. Since it’s a liver conference, when you click the virtual food truck you land on a page with healthy snack recipes.
Join the conversation, and what you say will impact what I talk about in the next issue.
Also, let me know any other thoughts you might have about the newsletter. I’d like to make sure you’re getting what you want out of this.
This newsletter will contain mistakes. When you find them, tell me about them so that I can fix them. I would rather this newsletter be correct than protect my ego.
Though I can’t correct the emailed version after it has been sent, I do update the online post of the newsletter every time a mistake is brought to my attention.
Correction: The “talk back” section appeared twice yesterday, and there were some broken links. I will chalk this up to exhaustion from being on a conference schedule centered on “London” in virtual space.
See you all next time. Have a great weekend.
Always,
JS