Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of April 13, 2020

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of April 13, 2020 – April 17, 2020.

Newsweek (4/12, Fearnow) reports that FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephan Hahn “said coronavirus testing will be necessary beyond May and ‘into the fall,’ as he acknowledged Sunday morning the U.S. is ‘very close to the peak’ of active cases.” While appearing on ABC’s This Week, Hahn “responded to criticism over why the U.S. is still so ‘far behind’ other countries in terms of COVID-19 testing and potential treatments, telling ABC News that antibody tests and all other determinations made by the agency depends purely on ‘the data and the science.” He also “pushed back on the White House’s latest suggestion last week that May 1 may be a ‘good target’ for re-opening the country from self-quarantine orders, saying ‘it’s too early to be able to tell that.’” Hahn continued, “The models do show that we are very close to the peak. So I think that information is accurate.”

The Hill (4/12, Coleman) also reports that “Hahn cautioned the country needed to have a ‘data-driven approach’ as it takes the pandemic ‘day by day as the data come in.’”

CNN (4/13, Cohen, Bruer) reports that, according to the CDC, people in New York City, Seattle, New Orleans, and San Francisco are listening to orders to stay home. A CDC report “found that, in all four places, close to 80% of people were leaving home on February 26. And by April 1, that declined between 20 percentage points and 40 percentage points in each city, with mobility decreasing each time a new social distancing order was issued.” CNN adds that “the CDC tracked mobility by looking at whether devices such as cell phones were brought more than 500 feet from the places they usually spend the night.”

The Washington Post (4/14, Cha) reports more than 9,000 health care workers had tested positive for coronavirus as of April 9, according to a report from the CDC released on Tuesday. According to the report, “they are mostly white, female, and in their 40s,” and while “most were not sick enough to be hospitalized, 27 died.”

USA Today (4/14, Rodriguez, Alltucker) reports “the CDC conceded the report’s findings underestimate the number of cases among health care workers because of uneven reporting across the country,” and “while in some states only 3% of” patients with coronavirus were health care workers, “the number was closer to 11% in those with more complete reporting.” The AMA, American Nurses Association, and the American Hospital Association have called for “the White House to use the Defense Production Act to bolster supplies” of PPE to protect health care workers and reduce the spread of the virus.

NBC News (4/15) reports that “while the official global death toll” from coronavirus “stands at more than 126,000 on Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University, that number represents a mere estimate.” According to NBC News, “Only countries with extensive testing can confirm their mortalities and, even in those with the necessary medical technologies, the simple act of counting the dead reflects the chaos that COVID-19 has wrought.”

The New York Times (4/16, Gorman) reports the NIH announced that “researchers have confirmed that there are several effective methods for decontaminating the N95 masks worn by health professionals so that they can be used more than once.” The NIH publicized the research, which was posted on medRxiv.

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