Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of March 23, 2020

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of March 23, 2020 – March 27, 2020.

Reuters (3/21, Singh) reported the FDA “approved the first rapid coronavirus diagnostic test, with a detection time of about 45 minutes, as the” U.S. “struggles to meet the demand for coronavirus testing.” The test was developed by Cepheid, a molecular diagnostics company based in California, who announced “it had received an emergency use authorization from the FDA for the test, which will be used primarily in hospitals and emergency rooms.”

The Hill (3/21, Weixel) reported Cepheid’s test is designed to operate on the company’s GeneXpert Systems. The article says there are more than 5,000 of these systems in the U.S. and more than 23,000 across the world.

STAT (3/21, Branswell) reports that the test “will likely be used in only the most urgent situations: triaging patients who are already in the hospital or the emergency room, and testing health care workers who might be infected to see if they can return to work.” The article says that “Cepheid’s machines can run one test at a time, and can be based near an emergency room or operating room.”

The Hill (3/23, Wilson) reports on Monday, the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “The pandemic is accelerating” with more than 350,000 cases in the world. Tedros called for countries to cooperate, “We need to attack the virus with aggressive and targeted tactics.” The article says that “it took 67 days to confirm the first hundred thousand cases, 11 days to confirm the second hundred thousand cases and just four days to confirm the third hundred thousand cases.”

NBC News (3/24, Hixenbaugh) reports, “The Food and Drug Administration will allow doctors across the country to begin using plasma donated by coronavirus survivors to treat patients who are critically ill with the virus, under new emergency protocols approved Tuesday.” The “decision comes a day after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state’s health department planned to begin treating the sickest coronavirus patients with antibody-rich plasma extracted from the blood of those who’ve recovered.”

The Hill (3/24, Budryk) reports, “The FDA has approved emergency protocols that allow doctors to request permission on a case-by-case basis for coronavirus patients. The plasma treatment will be exclusively used for patients who are close to death, with the FDA responding to most requests within four to eight hours and doctors having the option to contact the FDA’s Office of Emergency Operations for more time-sensitive cases.”

NPR (3/24, Palca) called it “an unusual move,” and says that “there is scant evidence it works in people infected with the coronavirus, but the approach has been tried for other illnesses.”

The Hill (3/25, Weixel) reports Anthony Fauci, MD, “the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a prominent member of the White House’s coronavirus task force,” warned Americans to “be prepared for the possibility that COVID-19 could become a seasonal disease.” During a White House briefing, Fauci “told reporters...that more cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus have begun to appear in the southern hemisphere, which is transitioning into colder seasons.” Should there be “an outbreak in the southern hemisphere, Fauci said ‘it will be inevitable’ that the disease will make a comeback even if it is temporarily stopped.”

USA Today (3/26, James) reports the U.S. “surged past China and Italy to become the planet’s most infected nation Thursday, a stark milestone in the coronavirus era – and a reminder of its deadly, culture-changing effects on American life.” The article says that “the Johns Hopkins University dashboard showed the U.S. with 85,840” cases “as of 11 p.m., ET, moving past Italy (80,589) and China (81,782),” and “more than 1,296 people have died in the U.S.”

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