Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

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Topic: Testing and Treatment


May 14, 2021

Diagnostic Performance of an Antigen Test with RT-PCR for the Detection of SARS-CoV-2 in a Hospital Setting — Los Angeles County, California, June–August 2020

An evaluation of the rapid Quidel Sofia 2 SARS Antigen FIA test in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at a large, tertiary medical center in Los Angeles found a lower sensitivity in symptomatic (72%) and asymptomatic (61%) patients compared to RT-PCR. Specificity of the Antigen test was >98% in both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients. The authors…


May 13, 2021

Persisting Salivary IgG against SARS-CoV-2 at 9 Months After Mild COVID-19: A Complementary Approach to Population Surveys

Anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike IgG antibodies were detectable in >85% of saliva samples obtained from 74 mostly mild COVID-19 patients up to 9 months-post symptom onset. Salivary IgG responses were highly correlated with anti-spike IgG. In contrast, anti-nucleocapsid IgG was much lower in samples collected 3 months post symptom onset. In a separate cohort of 147 asymptomatic…


May 12, 2021

Remdesivir for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis and Trial Sequential Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

A systematic review and meta-analysis of 5 randomized placebo-controlled trials (n=7,540 total participants) found no significant evidence that remdesivir (100 mg over 10 days) reduced all-cause mortality (RR=0.94, CI 0.82-1.07), clinical progression (RR=1.08, CI 0.99-1.18), or diarrhea (RR=0.82, CI 0.40-1.66). The authors conducted a trial sequential analysis and found that the meta-analysis was underpowered to…


A Randomized Double-Blind Controlled Trial of Convalescent Plasma in Adults with Severe COVID-19

Participants with severe COVID-19 randomized to receive convalescent plasma (n=150) had significantly lower 28-day mortality (OR=0.44, 95% CI: 0.22-.91) compared to those receiving controlled plasma (n=73) in a randomized double-blind controlled trial conducted in New York and Brazil. However, no significant improvement in clinical status, as measured on an ordinal scale, was observed at 28…


Inappropriate Antibiotic Use in the COVID-19 Era: Factors Associated with Inappropriate Prescribing and Secondary Complications

34% of COVID-19 patients in a multicenter cohort in Spain (n=13,932) were inappropriately prescribed antibiotics, defined as the patient not fulfilling any accepted criteria for use of antibiotics such as shock, sepsis, or coinfections. Patients admitted to the hospital early in the pandemic (February to March 2020) and presenting with dry cough, fever, and flu-like…


May 11, 2021

SARS-CoV-2 Rapid Antigen Test: High Sensitivity to Detect Infectious Virus

Overall sensitivity of the Panbio rapid antigen test was 71.8% and the sensitivity of the Orient Gene rapid antigen tests was 79.5% for the detection of 156 PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 positive samples. Tested against a panel of PCR-confirmed negative samples, the Panbio test achieved 100% specificity (130 of 130 negative samples) and the Orient Gene test…


A New SARS-CoV-2 Variant Poorly Detected by RT-PCR on Nasopharyngeal Samples with High Lethality

[Pre-print, not peer-reviewed] Patients confirmed by viral sequencing to be infected with a novel SARS-CoV-2 variant first described in France (assigned lineage B.1.616) (n=34) were less likely to test positive on their first PCR test (15% vs 97%) and more likely to die within 28 days (44% vs 16%) compared to patients infected with variants…


May 10, 2021

Performance of Three SARS-CoV-2 Immunoassays, Three Rapid Lateral Flow Tests and a Novel Bead-Based Affinity Surrogate Test for the Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in Human Serum

A study comparing the performance of three commercial immunoassays to detect SARS-CoV-2 IgA and IgG antibodies (Euroimmun SARS-COV-2 IgA/IgG, Mikrogen recomWell SARS-CoV-2 IgA/IgG, and SERION ELISA agile SARS-CoV-2 IgA/IgG) and three rapid lateral flow tests (Abbott Panbio COVID-19 IgG/IgM, NADAL COVID-19 IgG/IgM, and Cleartest Corona 2019-nCOV IgG/IgM) to a gold standard plaque-reduction neutralization test (PRNT50) found that the…


The Effect of Convalescent Plasma Therapy on Mortality Among Patients With COVID-19: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

A systematic review and meta-analysis found that patients with COVID-19 who received convalescent plasma in randomized clinical trials (n=10 studies) and matched control studies (n=20 studies) had lower mortality rates compared with patients receiving standard treatments (OR = 0.58). In addition, exploratory analysis found that early treatment (within 3 days of hospital admission) of higher…


Precision Health Diagnostic and Surveillance Network Uses S Gene Target Failure (SGTF) Combined with Sequencing Technologies to Identify Emerging SARS-CoV-2 Variants

[Pre-print, not peer-reviewed] A genomic surveillance algorithm developed to combine RT-PCR and sequencing technologies to identify SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern found the frequency of S Gene Target Failure (SGTF) exponentially to 47% and 48% by the last week of March 2021, in both Puerto Rico and US laboratories, respectively. SGTF is used as a proxy…



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