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This week in the COVID-19 news, researchers found SARS-CoV-2 in the urine of an infected patient, an Italian biotech company said its vaccine candidates showed promising preclinical results, and a couple of patients with COVID- 19 and other diseases recovered from infection. . But you didn’t see these headlines on Medscape. This is why.
Coronavirus in urine
Researchers at the first affiliated hospital of Guangzhou Medical University in Guangzhou, China reported that they isolated SARS-CoV-2 from the urine of a COVID-19 patient. Many reports of the identification of SARS-CoV-2 in various body fluids or on surfaces only show that the researchers isolated the RNA from the coronavirus through PCR tests, but in this study the researchers tested whether the coronavirus they isolated was still capable of infecting cells. They found that this was so. “Adequate precautions must be taken to avoid transmission of urine,” they write.
This SARS-CoV-2 report on a single urine sample is not the first, and yet researchers who conducted a larger study looking at 72 urine samples for the coronavirus found that none tested positive. A single case report is not enough to change clinical practice, even for COVID-19. Especially given the conflicting evidence from a larger study, we don’t think our readers need to spend time on this case report.
Italian biotechnology vaccine
Rome-based biotech company Takis announced that its five candidate vaccines induced a strong antibody response against SARS-CoV-2 in animal testing, according to a press release. An Italian scientific publication reports that human tests are expected to be carried out after the summer.
Many vaccines for COVID-19 are being developed, and some are already being tested in clinical trials. We do not think that this press release on preclinical testing, as promising as it was, deserved the attention of busy clinicians.
Recovery stories
Two heartwarming stories in local media that received a lot of attention online tell how a man with cancer and a 7-year-old boy with sickle cell anemia recovered from episodes with COVID-19. The man received remdesivir and the boy received three blood transfusions, according to press reports. “He had to get caught by the needle because the needle kept coming out,” said the boy’s mother. “Seeing him go through that was really scary.”
Stories like these, and an earlier one from Medscape about an Italian doctor who recovered after receiving tocilizumab, highlight that many people sick with COVID-19 recover. In fact, so many do it that we could hardly keep up, even if we try to write about every recovery case. Because these recent news reports do not contain enough medical information to be useful to physicians, we decided not to cover these particular cases of recovery.
Ellie Kincaid is an associate associate editor at Medscape. He has previously written about health care for Forbes, the Wall street journaland Natural medicine.
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