Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of March 2, 2020

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of March 2, 2020 – March 6, 2020.

The New York Times (2/29, Sheikh) reported the FDA announced that coronavirus testing “would be greatly expanded in the United States, giving laboratories and hospitals around the country the go-ahead to conduct tests that had until now been severely limited to those analyzed by the” CDC. The Times says that the FDA’s “decision should improve the pace of detecting coronavirus infections and make it possible to more rapidly spot patterns of suspected or confirmed cases.”

Meanwhile, the AP (3/1, Flaccus, Superville) reports, “health officials in Washington state said Sunday night that a second person had died from the coronavirus – a man in his 70s from a nursing facility near Seattle where dozens of people were sick and had been tested for the virus.”

The New York Times (3/1, A1, Fink, Baker) reports, “Researchers who have examined the genomes of two coronavirus infections in Washington State say the similarities between the cases suggest that the virus may have been spreading in the state for weeks.”

The AP (3/2, Neergaard) reports, “Most American adults need to be checked for hepatitis C, say guidelines released Monday” by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force “that urge millions more people to get screened for the liver-damaging virus that can fester for decades [before] it’s spotted.” The USPSTF’s “call for expanded screening for Americans ages 18 to 79 is the first since 2013 when U.S. health authorities urged all baby boomers to get a one-time hepatitis C test because that age group appeared at particularly high risk.” On March 2, the USPSTF announced that “hepatitis C is on the rise because of the opioid crisis, prompting the recommendation to expand testing.”

CNN (3/2, Howard) reports the task force “now recommends screening for hepatitis C infection in all adults ages 18 to 79 without known liver disease, regardless of their risk,” an updated recommendation that “expands the task force’s previous 2013 recommendation, which was to screen only adults born between 1945 and 1965 and others at high risk for infection.” The recommendation statement was published online in JAMA.

Reuters (3/2, Mishra, Erman) reports Valisure, an online pharmacy, announced “its tests showed high levels of a probable cancer-causing impurity in [the] diabetes drug metformin” and that it has called for the FDA to recall the lots they identified. Valisure announced that high levels of NDMA “were found in metformin made by 11 companies, including Amneal Pharmaceuticals Inc and Aurobindo Pharma Ltd.”

The Washington Post (3/4, Werner, Debonis) reports Congress reached a bipartisan agreement to approve an emergency spending bill this week to respond to the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. The article says that “the deal must still be voted on by the House and Senate, but bipartisan support is expected.” The article adds that the amount “is more than triple the size of the White House’s budget request from last week.”

The Wall Street Journal (3/4, Duehren, Subscription Publication) reports the bill would allocate more than $3 billion to develop treatments for coronavirus, $2.2 billion to prevent the spread of the virus, and more than $1 billion on overseas aid.

Modern Healthcare (3/4, Cohrs, Subscription Publication) reports the bill “also provides $500 million for the use of telehealth services and allows seniors to access telemedicine services for coronavirus treatment after” the AMA and others “asked lawmakers to lift cost-sharing requirements and restrictions on telehealth service provision.” The article adds that Congress “decided to leave hospital reimbursement for their response to the COVID-19 outbreak to federal agencies and states in” the emergency spending bill.

Modern Healthcare (3/5, Cohen, Subscription Publication) reports that the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) "has canceled its annual health information and technology conference in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak," confirming the "cancellation of the event, which had been slated to run March 9-13 in Orlando, Fla., to exhibitors Thursday afternoon." HIMSS holds "one of the largest gatherings of health IT professionals in the nation, typically drawing in more than 40,000 attendees," with President Trump even "scheduled to speak on March 9, marking the first time a sitting president would have given remarks at the event and leading some to predict HHS planned to release final versions of long-awaited information-blocking and interoperability rules at HIMSS20."

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