ICYMI:
Infectious Disease Outbreaks, Pandemics, and Hollywood—Hope and Fear Across a Century of Cinema
JAMA Apr 24, the author is a pediatric infectious disease doctor!
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765300
Other items:
Home care agencies are dealing with CV19: AP article in Seattle Times (Click to get to link)
An young ER doc-in-training is given the task to call folks to tell them their CV19 test turned positive: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/24/call-people-covid-19-positive-lessons-learned/
Surprisingly detailed NYT article about a man with such severe CV19 lungs he went past the need of a ventilator to needing ECMO (essentially artificial lung, sometimes called a heart-lung machine), but happily survived: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/health/coronavirus-patient-ventilator.html
Founder of” Up to Date”, basically an online textbook used by thousands of providers, a Harvard nephrologist, died of CV19 https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/25/remembering-uptodate-creator-burton-bud-rose/
The CDC now lists cough and shortness of breath as most important, but also lists “new” symptoms for CV19, like loss of smell, chills, shaking chills, and muscle aches. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html
COMMENTS: What is disappointing (to me) is finding the CDC lists symptoms in kids buried elsewhere: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/pediatric-hcp.html. Of course, kids don’t get as sick, even though there are news reports of rare severe problems (BBC news).
Interestingly, many systemic viruses cause rash (measles is also an RNA virus), but evidently CV19 doesn’t have a consistent rash. There have been reports of localized skin findings, but it’s unclear whether they are related. Other things are being reported in the elderly, but are not specific. ANYWAY, it’s clear that no ONE symptom or even three grouped together is 100%, or “pathognomonic” or “sine qua non” or diagnostic.
The lack of specificity has led to speculations that the CV19 illness rate and death rate are much higher than can be reported by limited testing. In Sweden for example, famous for not doing a lockdown and having “only” a few hundred more deaths than neighboring Norway, they know that CV19 deaths are under-reported in the elderly (BBC news).
