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Healthgrades communicates performance in two ways—through ratings and awards—to assist consumers in evaluating and comparing hospital performance specific to specialist service lines and speciality emphasis areas. Using Medicare inpatient data from the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) file purchased from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for the years 2019 through 2021, hospitals were evaluated for overall clinical excellence and measure performance. Data on patient outcomes for 31 diseases or treatments were examined for almost all hospitals in the nation. Also, with the fewest occurrences of 14 avoidable patient safety events, hospitals in the top 10% of the country are honored with the Patient Safety Excellence Award, and analyzing data from surveys of the hospital’s own patients to evaluate patient experience across 10 metrics, the top 15% of hospitals receive the Outstanding Patient Experience Award. Finally, each year, Healthgrades recognizes hospitals in the United States that offer the most common gynecologic treatments and where patients are at a decreased risk of complications during their stay for labor and delivery.

Greater adherence to a number of healthy eating patterns was linked to a lower risk of death in this cohort study, which included 44,085 men and 75,230 women from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (1986-2020) and the Nurses’ Health Study (1984-2020). These relationships held true for persons who were Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic White, as well as for other racial and ethnic groupings.

Shortness of breath and a cough were the first symptoms that were frequently recorded at the beginning of the pandemic, followed by vascular damage. Since then, there has been a change in symptom clusters and symptoms among the variants, which has been influenced by the virus’s evolution as well as vaccinations, the landscape of vaccines, the use of other treatments, and patients who experience recurring infections. The way that symptoms manifest has changed because to vaccination, acquired protection from earlier infections, and the evolution of omicron to cause generally less severe acute infections. Currently, the majority of the symptoms that doctors are observing are upper respiratory symptoms, such as coughing, sneezing, and sore throat.

This large cohort study evaluated the frequency of 70 long COVID outcomes in unvaccinated individuals with mild COVID infection matched to uninfected individuals and to vaccinated individuals. Anosmia and dysgeusia were the most frequently reported long COVID symptoms with the risk being dramatically increasing at 30 days to 6 months post infection and falling rapidly thereafter. Mild COVID generated an 85% increased risk of cognitive impairment an 80% increased risk of dyspnea and weakness and a nearly 50% increased risk for palpitations. The findings were consistent across all COVID variants and were more marked in adults than children. Vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infection had similar risk for all these outcomes with the exception of dyspnea, for which the risk was lower in vaccinated persons.

Per this Nature article highlighted on MashupMD, inadequate funding plus fears of rebound and side effects are hobbling the availability and use of this potentially lifesaving antiviral.

The original monovalent vaccines continue to protect against serious disease from the new variants. If SARS-CoV-2 variants evolve to resist the protection against severe disease offered by vaccination or previous infection, then variant-specific vaccines will be needed. Otherwise, this authority recommends we “stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later.”