Articles related to COVID-19/CORONAVIRUS

Following completion of this CME activity, health-system and specialty pharmacists should be better able to review the transmissibility and clinical severity associated with SARS-CoV-2 variants, analyze the efficacy of vaccines and boosters for the prevention of infection and severe disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 variants, analyze the efficacy of oral antivirals and remdesivir in light of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, and discuss the efficacy of monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma for prevention and treatment in the clinical context of current and evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Reports on the Vaccine Safety Datalink flagged the need to investigate a potential increased risk those 65 years of age and older, for ischemic stroke in the first 21 days after receiving the bivalent Pfizer-BioNTech booster. FDA has parallel monitoring systems to confirm or fail to validate a safety signal. In this case, those other systems did not confirm the Vaccine Safety Datalink flag.

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.”