Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Jan. 11, 2021

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Jan. 11, 2021 – Jan. 15, 2021.

The New York Times (1/8, Belluck) reported many people who recover from COVID-19 “will experience lingering problems like fatigue, insomnia, depression, anxiety or diminished lung function.” Researchers studied 1,733 patients “who were discharged from a hospital in Wuhan” and “found that more than three-quarters of them had at least one symptom six months later.” The study was published in The Lancet.

The Washington Post (1/11, Ellerbeck) reports, “Research suggests most people who recovered from COVID-19 are immune for at least eight months,” but “epidemiologists are largely still urging this population to get the vaccine if it’s their turn in line.” Official guidance from the CDC “says vaccines should be offered regardless of whether people were previously infected,” and “also says the vaccine is safe for people who have had a prior infection.”

The AP (1/12, Stobbe) reports the U.S. “reported another record one-year decline in the...cancer death rate, a drop they attribute to success against lung cancer.” The U.S. cancer death rate has been decreasing since 1991, and “from 2017 to 2018, it fell 2.4%, according to an American Cancer Society report, topping the record 2.2% drop reported the year before.” The report was published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

The Hill (1/12, Sullivan) reports Rebecca Siegel, the report’s lead author, said, “We anticipate that disruptions in access to cancer care in 2020 will lead to downstream increases in advanced stage diagnoses that may impede progress in reducing cancer mortality rates in the years to come.” From 1991 to 2018, “there has been a total decrease in the cancer death rate of 31%,” and “an estimated 3.2 million cancer deaths have been averted from 1991 through 2018 due to reductions in smoking, earlier detection, and improvements in treatment,” according to the report.

CNN (1/13, Gumbrecht) reports that a new CDC report “found that COVID-19 cases among younger children remained low even after schools restarted for in-person learning. To safely reopen schools, however, transmission in communities must be kept in check.” The report, “published Wednesday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, considered more than 2.8 million laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases in people ages zero to 24 from March 1 through December 12.”

According to Bloomberg (1/13, Cortez), the report says the “CDC recommends that K-12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely.”

CNN (1/14, Maxouris) reports 92,000 Americans “are projected to die from the virus over roughly the next three weeks, according to an ensemble forecast published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” CNN adds that the projections are consistent with experts’ warnings that the U.S. “is still facing challenging times ahead,” even with ongoing vaccinations.

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