1 April 2020 Blog Post: Good News and Bad News

In one of the latest developments in coronavirus disease (COVID-19) comes some good news from a randomized clinical trial in China. Among 62 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, there was evidence that hydroxychloroquine helped shorten the time to recovery.

At Santa Monica Primary Care, we are now able to refer interested patients to an ongoing clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine. The trial is recruiting test proven, symptomatic COVID-19 cases within 4 days of symptom onset as well as any household contacts exposed to a known COVID-19 case.

Additionally, there are several independent efforts that will seek to enroll COVID-19 patients in order to perform contact tracing effort via cell phone data. While these are not yet up and running, it will provide yet another opportunity for interested patients to participate.

In the bad news about COVID-19 today, two separate studies have shown that the virus seems to be shed most readily in the upper respiratory tract early in the disease course, when symptoms are mild. According to German researchers writing
in the journal Nature, viral shedding was highest during the first week of symptoms, peaking at day 4 in their study. Separately, in MMWR, researchers from Singapore showed that “presymptomatic” transmission occurred roughly 1–3 days before symptom onset. Overall, 10 of 157 (6.4%) of locally acquired cases in Singapore were attributed to presymptomatic transmission.
 
In our clinic the point prevalence of positive testing remains steady, with 15.3% of our samples returning with positive COVID-19 results.
 

𝗦𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗨𝗽 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀𝗹𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿

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