By Stephen Feller
The FDA on Monday approved and authorized updated COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech that target omicron XBB subvariants of SARS-CoV-2.
The agency fully approved the monovalent messenger RNA vaccines for people aged 12 years or older and authorized them for emergency use among people aged 6 months to 11 years. Read more in Healio.
By Stuart Katz, MD, Alice Perlowski, MD, MA, and Brittany Taylor, MPH
This year marks the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, as the virus morphed and continued to disrupt our daily lives, people around the world grew tired of COVID restrictions. As a result, we saw mask mandates lift, social distancing practices fade, and vaccination rates decline as more shots became available. Understandably, people were — and still are — longing for pre-pandemic normalcy. Nonetheless, a looming reality remains: With hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations each week in the U.S. alone, the pandemic is neither over nor behind us. Read more in MedPage Today.
by Stuart Katz, MD, Alice Perlowski, MD, MA, and Brittany Taylor, MPH
This year marks the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, as the virus morphed and continued to disrupt our daily lives, people around the world grew tired of COVID restrictions. As a result, we saw mask mandates lift, social distancing practices fade, and vaccination rates decline as more shots became available. Understandably, people were — and still are — longing for pre-pandemic normalcy.
Read the full article in MedPage Today.
By Jeremy White, Pam Belluck, Noah Bassetti-Blum and Eleanor Lutz
More than three years after the start of the pandemic, many COVID-19 survivors continue to struggle. Some, especially those who became so severely ill that they were hospitalized and unable to breathe on their own, face lasting lung damage.
To better understand the long-term impact of COVID’s assault on the lungs, The New York Times spoke with three patients who were hospitalized during the pandemic’s early waves, interviewed doctors who treated them and reviewed CT scans of their lungs over time.
Read the full story from The New York Times.
By Scott Buzby
Following SARS-CoV-2 infection, mitochondrial function remained impaired in the heart, liver and kidneys, despite observed recovery in the lungs, according to a human autopsy and animal tissue study.
“Upon SARS-CoV-2 infection of host cells, the viral copy number increases unchecked until the innate immune system is engaged, after which the viral copies progressively decline until the virus is eliminated,” Joseph Guarnieri, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and colleagues wrote. Read the full article in Healio.
By Sophie Putka
Patients who received lung transplants due to irreversible respiratory failure from SARS-CoV-2 infection had similar outcomes to those who received lung transplants for other reasons, a retrospective study found.
Among 195 patients with COVID-19-related acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) who underwent lung transplants, 1-, 6-, and 12-month overall survival rates were 99%, 95%, and 88%. For 190 patients who had COVID-19-related pulmonary fibrosis, survival rates were 96%, 92%, and 84%, respectively. Read the full article in MedPage Today.
By Michele Sullivan
Patients on maintenance dialysis had somewhat higher rates of SARS-CoV-2 infections and related deaths than seen in the general U.S. population, although immunization mitigated some of the excess risk, the CDC reported.
From June 30, 2021, to Sept. 27, 2022, the overall infection rate per 10,000 patient-weeks was 30.47 among maintenance dialysis patients, with a range from 20.13-46.45 across the different waves of variants compared with 17.13-43.62 per 10,000 population-weeks in the general population. Read the full article in MedPage Today.
By Brittany Magelssen
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted organ transplants in unprecedented ways. Many transplant centers considered slowing down and even pausing all transplants, mostly due to the potential risk of COVID-19 to organ donors, transplant recipients and care providers.
In a study published in the May 2023 special issue of Production and Operations Management on managing pandemics, two operations management researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas analyzed the impact of pausing transplants on patient outcomes.
Read the complete article from The University of Texas at Dallas.
By Caitlyn Stulpin
This fall, older adults in the United States will have the opportunity to receive three vaccines to against fall and winter season respiratory illnesses — COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.
We asked Aaron E. Glatt, MD, MACP, FIDSA, FSHEA, chairman of the department of medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau and professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, if physicians should encourage patients to bundle the three vaccines into a single visit. Read the full story in Healio.
The following is a summary of “Patterns in Use and Transplant Outcomes Among Adult Recipients of Kidneys From Deceased Donors With COVID-19,” published in the May 2023 issue of Nephrology by Ji et al.
For a study, researchers aimed to determine the kidney utilization patterns and transplant outcomes in adult recipients of deceased donor kidneys with active or resolved COVID-19. This study analyzed the information from 35,851 deceased donors (71,334 kidneys) and 45,912 adult patients who underwent kidney transplantation between March 1, 2020, and March 30, 2023. Read the complete article in Physician’s Weekly.