Testing, Treatment And Vaccines: Unpacking Efforts To Contain The Coronavirus
Find the “Novel Coronavirus HealthMap” here. Find all of NEJM’s coronavirus coverage here.
The editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine talks about what we’re learning about the coronavirus and how that might shape the month to come.
Guests
Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journalism of Medicine. Professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. (@NEJM)
Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Former president of the National Academy of Medicine. (@MooreFound)
From The Reading List
The New England Journal of Medicine: “Ten Weeks to Crush the Curve” — “The economy is in the tank, and anywhere from thousands to more than a million American lives are in jeopardy. Most analyses of options and trade-offs assume that both the pandemic and the economic setback must play out over a period of many months for the pandemic and even longer for economic recovery. However, as the economists would say, there is a dominant option, one that simultaneously limits fatalities and gets the economy cranking again in a sustainable way.”
The New England Journal of Medicine: “Emerging Tools in the Fight against Covid-19” — “The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus that emerged in late 2019, and the resulting Covid-19 disease has been labeled a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. What physicians need to know about transmission, diagnosis, and treatment is the subject of ongoing updates from infectious disease experts at the Journal.”
The New England Journal of Medicine: “Developing Covid-19 Vaccines at Pandemic Speed” — “The need to rapidly develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 comes at a time of explosion in basic scientific understanding, including in areas such as genomics and structural biology, that is supporting a new era in vaccine development. Over the past decade, the scientific community and the vaccine industry have been asked to respond urgently to epidemics of H1N1 influenza, Ebola, Zika, and now SARS-CoV-2.”
The New England Journal of Medicine: “Transmission of 2019-nCoV Infection from an Asymptomatic Contact in Germany” — “The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from Wuhan is currently causing concern in the medical community as the virus is spreading around the world.1 Since identification of the virus in late December 2019, the number of cases from China that have been imported into other countries is on the rise, and the epidemiologic picture is changing on a daily basis. We are reporting a case of 2019-nCoV infection acquired outside Asia in which transmission appears to have occurred during the incubation period in the index patient.”
The New England Journal of Medicine: “Ensuring and Sustaining a Pandemic Workforce” — “Current efforts to fight the Covid-19 pandemic aim to slow viral spread and increase testing, protect health care workers from infection, and obtain ventilators and other equipment to prepare for a surge of critically ill patients. But additional actions are needed to rapidly increase health workforce capacity and to replenish it when personnel are quarantined or need time off to rest or care for sick family members. It seems clear that health care delivery organizations, educators, and government leaders will all have to be willing to cut through bureaucratic barriers and adapt regulations to rapidly expand the U.S. health care workforce and sustain it for the duration of the pandemic.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2020 NPR]
