Article Summary
December 23, 2020
Epidemiology of COVID-19 Infection in Young Children under Five Years: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
A meta-analysis of laboratory confirmed COVID-19 in children under 5 years of age determined that children were frequently prescribed antibiotics and that the majority of the reported cases were children less than one year old. Bhuiyan et al. identified 65 studies of epidemiological and clinical characteristics of lab-confirmed COVID-19 infections in 1,214 children under age…
Variation in US Hospital Mortality Rates for Patients Admitted With COVID-19 During the First 6 Months of the Pandemic
COVID-19 mortality rates in the US declined among hospitalized patients over the first few months of the pandemic with better outcomes associated with low community prevalence of COVID-19, according to a retrospective cohort analysis. The authors constructed a cohort of 38,517 adults from a deidentified administrative database in patients admitted with COVID-19 from January 1…
Assessment of Maternal and Neonatal SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load, Transplacental Antibody Transfer, and Placental Pathology in Pregnancies During the COVID-19 Pandemic
A prospective cohort study of 127 pregnant women found inefficient transplacental transfer of maternal SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies and no evidence for prolonged viremia in either maternal or fetal circulation. No detectable viremia in maternal or cord blood was identified in 64 participants diagnosed with COVID-19 and no SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in 88 tested placentas….
Evaluating the Efficacy of COVID-19 Vaccines
Using dual or triple primary endpoints that include SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic infection and severe COVID-19 could speed up characterization and licensure of vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, according to models of placebo controlled-vaccine trials. The authors suggest that dual or triple primary endpoints could speed up the discovery, characterization, and licensure of effective vaccines by creating data…
Antibody Responses 8 Months after Asymptomatic or Mild SARS-CoV-2 Infection
Choe et al. used four commercial immunoassays to measure SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from seven participants with asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and 51 patients with mildly symptomatic infections eight months after they tested positive by rt-PCR. For three of the four immunoassays used, seropositivity rates were high (69% to 91%). Antibody positivity differed significantly between the immunoassay methods,…
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ Updated Interim Recommendation for Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine — United States, December 2020
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) now recommends that the COVID-19 vaccine be offered to people over the age of 75 and non-health care frontline workers in Phase 1B of the vaccine rollout. This is an update to recent vaccine allocation recommendations that suggested vaccinating health care personnel and long-term care facility residents against…
Multiplex Assays for the Identification of Serological Signatures of SARS-CoV-2 Infection: An Antibody-Based Diagnostic and Machine Learning Study
Testing for multiple biomarkers, as opposed to testing for a single antibody, increased the sensitivity of correctly identifying past SARS-CoV-2 infection. A multiplex serological assay was used to measure IgG and IgM antibody responses to seven SARS-CoV-2-specific antigens, two seasonal coronavirus antigens, and three non-coronavirus antigens. Antibodies were measured in serum samples collected up to…
ACTIV-3/TICO LY-CoV555 Study Group. (Dec 22, 2020). A Neutralizing Monoclonal Antibody for Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19
A randomized clinical trial among patients hospitalized with COVID-19 that aimed to assess the effect of LY-CoV555, a neutralizing monoclonal antibody, was halted due to futility after 314 patients had undergone infusion with either the antibody or a placebo. Patients who received the antibody infusion did not have better clinical outcomes at day five than…
Early Empirical Assessment of the N501Y Mutant Strains of SARS-CoV-2 in the United Kingdom October to November 2020
[pre-print; not peer-reviewed] Leung at al. estimate that the SARS-CoV-2 lineage that has rapidly become the most dominant in the United Kingdom is 75% more transmissible than the previous lineage, potentially due to a mutation in the receptor binding domain of the spike protein. Their estimates suggest that the R0 for the mutated 501Y strain…
December 21, 2020
Excess Mortality in California During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic, March to August 2020
During the COVID-19 pandemic in California, older adults, residents who identified as Black and Latino, and those without college degrees have experienced the highest per capita excess mortality. From March 1 through August 22, 2020, an estimated 19,806 deaths in excess of those predicted by historical trends occurred in California. Excess deaths among Latino residents…
Previous page Next page