Nov 29, Reuters - The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID 19. They have research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and has yet to be certified by peer review.
New findings suggest that relapses with the virus that causes COVID 19 are rarely severe. The researchers in Qatar compared 1,304 individuals with a second SARS-CoV infection with 6,520 people infected with the virus for the first time. The researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of MedicineNew England Journal of Medicine that the odds of developing severe disease were 88% lower for people with second infections. Infected patients were 90 % less likely to be hospitalized compared to patients infected for the first time, and no one in the study with a second infection required intensive care or died from COVID- 19, said Dr. Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar in Doha. Nearly all of the reinfections were mild, perhaps because of immune memory that prevented the deterioration of the infection to more severe outcomes, he said. The researchers estimated that the risk for severe illness in people who had been infected before was only 1% of the risk associated with initial COVID 19 infections. For half of those with a second infection, the first infection had occurred more than nine months earlier. The researchers noted that it is not clear how long immune protection would last against severe reinfection. If it does last a long time, they speculate that it might mean that as the coronaviruses become endemic, infections could become more benign. In COVID-19 survivors struggling with lingering shortness of breath for which doctors don't have an explanation, cardiac stress testing may help identify the cause of the problem, researchers say. The current clinical guidelines do not recommend cardiopulmonary exercise testing because of the concern that this test could worsen the patients' symptoms. Cardiopulmonary exercise testing was able to identify decreased exercise capacity in about 45% of patients, according to Dr. Donna Mancini, a physician at Mount Sinai in New York. The study's findings showed that 18 men and 23 women had persistent shortness of breath for more than three months after recovering from COVID - 19, according to a report published on Monday. They had normal-looking results on lung function tests, chest X-rays, chest CT scans and echocardiograms. Mancini said that the exercise tests revealed problems that would otherwise have been missed. Functional testing recommended by the guidelines, such as a 6 minute walk test, would not be able to detect these abnormalities, she said.
Researchers reported on Monday in Nature Medicine that Smartwatch alerting systems for early detection of COVID 19 infection are closer to reality. They tested their new system, developed with open-source software, in 2,155 wearers of Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin watches or other devices. 84 of the volunteers were diagnosed with coronaviruses - including 14 of 18 people without symptoms. The researchers' algorithms generated alerts in 67 80% of the infected individuals, on average three days before symptoms began. This is the first time that asymptomatic detection has been shown for COVID - 19, they said. The system is mainly dependent on measurements of wearers' resting heart rate, said Michael Snyder of Stanford University School of Medicine in California. He hopes that watch manufacturers will be able to provide other types of highly accurate physiologic data. Snyder said that many stressors can trigger the alerting. Most of these are easy to spot, so the user knows to ignore the alerts because they are easy to spot travel, excessive alcohol, even work or other types of stress. When watches can report other health data such as heart rate variability, respiration rate, skin temperature and oxygen levels, it will become easier to distinguish COVID 19 cases from other non-COVID 19 events, researchers said. Snyder said that we are running this as a research study. We hope that FDA approved devices will dominate this area.