Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Oct. 5, 2020

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Oct. 5, 2020 – Oct. 9, 2020.

CNN (10/2, Fox) reported, “Adults can sometimes suffer from dangerous symptoms that resemble a coronavirus-linked syndrome in children, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.” The researchers are “calling it multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults, or MIS-A, and say it’s similar to multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children or MIS-C. Like MIS-C, MIS-A is not obviously linked to coronavirus and sufferers may not show any other symptoms that would point to [COVID-19] infection.”

The New York Times (10/5, Mandavilli) reports, “Two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down a statement about airborne transmission of the coronavirus, the agency on Monday replaced it with language citing new evidence that the virus can spread beyond six feet indoors.” The CDC’s new guidance reads, “These transmissions occurred within enclosed spaces that had inadequate ventilation. Sometimes the infected person was breathing heavily, for example while singing or exercising.”

The Washington Post (10/5, Sun, Guarino) reports, “The long-awaited update to the agency Web page explaining how the virus spreads represents an official acknowledgment of growing evidence that under certain conditions, people farther than six feet apart can become infected by tiny droplets and particles that float in the air for minutes and hours, and that they play a role in the pandemic.”

Bloomberg (10/7, Gale) reports that research indicates that patients with COVID-19 “who experience even the mildest illness risk suffering symptoms for months.” Investigators found that “two-thirds of patients who had a mild-to-moderate case of [COVID-19] reported symptoms 60 days after falling ill, when more than a third still felt sick or in a worse condition than when their coronavirus infection began.” The study also found that “prolonged symptoms were more likely among patients aged 40 to 60 years and those who required hospitalization.” The findings were published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection.

USA Today (10/7, Bacon, Stucka) reports on Wednesday, the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. passed 7.5 million, “with most states seeing a rise in cases and a startling nine of them setting ominous seven-day records for infections.” USA Today analyzed data from Johns Hopkins University through late Tuesday and found “Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming all set state records in the seven-day period.”

NBC News (10/8, Edwards) reports researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK “have concluded that hydroxychloroquine does nothing to prevent COVID-19-related deaths.” The research “is a continuation of a major clinical trial that found that the drug...had no clinical benefit.” The study, “published in the New England Journal of Medicine, examined the outcomes of 1,561 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who received hydroxychloroquine and compared them to 3,155 patients who served as a control group.”

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