Nearly 1 million people around the world who have lost their lives in COVID-19 have given us a gift: Through their efforts to save their lives, scientists now better understand how to treat and prevent the disease – and millions more Others can live.
Ming Wang, 71, and his wife were on a cruise from Australia to Australia, taking a break after many decades of running the family’s Chinese restaurant in Paplin, Nebraska. He was admitted to the hospital in the 74 days before his death in June, doctors definitely tried various antiviral approaches, including to enter a study of antiviral drugs that was ultimately promised.
“It was just a touch and go. “We say yes to whatever they want to try,” said Wang’s daughter, Pe’s Peterson. “We’ll give him anything to get back, but if we and the future patients he goes through are helped, that’s what we need.”
Patients are already benefiting. Although the U.S. And elsewhere this fall is expected more due to the recent rise in coronavirus infections, however, there are also signs that mortality is declining and those who have contracted the virus are in better condition than in the early months. Nationwide epidemic.
“Some of the reasons we’re doing better is due to advances,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, told the Associated Press. “Many drugs have proven useful and doctors know more about how to care for the most vulnerable patients in hospitals,” he said.
“We’re at a stage where we’re dealing with” naughty adolescence “learning -” everything grew up, “Collins said.
Awesome toll
About 1 million deaths due to coronavirus in nine months are 690,000 of AIDS or more than 400,000 of all malaria in 2019. They are 1.5 million behind tuberculosis.
Wealth and power have not saved rich countries from the terrible power of the virus. The United States has been “the most affected country in the world”, with more than 6 million coronavirus infections and more than 200,000 deaths, indicating that “the success we have had in this outbreak is due to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease specialist, told an audience at Harvard Medical School earlier this month.
Due to high blood pressure and other conditions, the U.S. More than 40% of adults are at risk of contracting the disease. It’s not just older people in nursing homes who are dying, Fockie stressed.
D Ge. Jesse Goodman, a former chief scientist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has now agreed at Georgetown University.
“No one should make a mistake about this” and they think they are not at risk because they have died or do not personally recognize someone who has not witnessed what the virus itself can do.
SIG ptimistic signs
Although cases are on the rise, mortality rates appear to be declining, with former U.S. scientists working for disease control and prevention. Centers, now in the for-profit group Resolve to Save Lives, Dr. Said Cyrus Shahpar.
The true lethality of the virus – the mortality rate of the infection – is not yet known, as scientists do not know how many people have done it without showing symptoms. The most frequently reported case is the mortality rate – the part of people who have tested positive and then died. The comparison of this country to country is problematic due to the difference in the population of the tested and the vulnerable. Tracking this in a country over time also carries a risk, but it can indicate some trends.
“The U.S. cumulative mortality rate was around 5% in April. We are now about 3%, ”Shahpar said.
In England, researchers have reported a significant drop in case mortality since the peak in April. August Gust was around 1.5%, up from 6% every six weeks ago.
There is a reason for demographic change: more cases these days are among young people who are less likely to die from the infection than older people.
“Increased testing is also playing a role: finding more people with mild or no symptoms increases the number of known infections and shrinks the risk of fatalities,” Shahpar said.
Good treatment
It is clear that treatment is also affecting survival, many doctors said. People who have died from COVID-19, especially those who took part in the study, have been helped to reveal what drugs do or do not help.
Dexamethasone and similar steroids are now known to improve survival when used in hospitalized patients who need oxygen oxygen, but can be harmful to less sick patients.
An antiviral drug, remedacivir, can speed recovery recovery for critically ill patients, who are in the grip of an average hospital stay of four days. Two anti-inflammatory drugs, one used in a combination of rimadesivir – the drug Wang helped in the test – have been reported for help, although the results of those studies have not yet been published.
The jury is still out on convulsive plasma, in which survivors’ antibody-filled blood is used to treat others. No large, high-quality study has done this test to see if it works.
Hardness, the value of scientific studies for treatment has become clear, Goodman said. “We’re definitely looking at what happens” when they have hydroxychloroquine in them without treatment being widely adopted, he said. “It exposed a lot of people to potentially toxic drugs” and delayed the search for effective ones.
U.S. The director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Dr. Gary Gibbons said that apart from medications, “case mortality actually improves over time as physicians become more skilled at caring for these very sick patients.”
In hospitals, doctors now know more about ways to avoid the use of breathing machines, such as keeping patients on their stomachs.
“We learned about how to maintain patients’ condition, how to use oxygen, how to administer fluids, and how hospitals have increased their growth capacity and supply,” said Judith Courier, a physician at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a recent webinar. Organized by the American Public Health Association and the US National Academy of Medicine Medicine.
In the future
The best way to avoid dying from coronavirus is to avoid getting it, and experience has shown that simple measures advocated by public health officials work.
“Prevention is the most important step right now because we are waiting for the vaccine and we will improve the treatment,” Goodman said.
Wearing a face mask, washing hands, keeping feet to a minimum and disinfecting surfaces clearly has a positive effect, the FAC said.
“If more people stick to common sense measures such as closing the bar, we need to improve our ability to handle this and prevent further deaths,” Shahpar said. “It should take a long time in the next million if that happens.”
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Marilyn Marchione can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
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The Associated Press The Department of Health and Science is supported by the Department of Science Education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. AP is fully responsible for all content.
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