COVID-19 here to stay till 2021, aggressive testing needed to curb its spread: Health experts

Global health experts on Wednesday said novel coronavirus is here to stay for more than a year and called for aggressive testing to prevent its spread. In an interaction with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, health experts Professor Ashish Jha and Professor Johan Giesecke talked about the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the series being aired on Congress social media channels.While Jha exuded confidence that a vaccine will be available in a years time, Prof Giesecke said India should practice a lockdown that is as soft as possible, as a severe lockdown will ruin its economy very quickly....read more

CMAAO Coronavirus Facts and Myth Buster 107 Immuno-hyper inflammation

926: IMA-CMAAO Webinar on “Update on Covid-19 - Immuno-hyper inflammation” ,23rd May, 2020, 4-5 pmParticipants: Dr KK Aggarwal, President CMAAO, Dr Rajan Sharma, National President IMA, Dr RV Asokan, Honorary Secretary General IMA, Dr Ramesh K Dutta, Dr Jayakrishnan Alapet, Dr Sanchita SharmaFaculty: Dr Rohini Handa, Senior Consultant Rheumatologist, Apollo Hospitals, New Delhi, Former Prof., Dept. of Rheumatology, AIIMS, New Delhi ....read more

CMAAO Coronavirus Facts and Myth Buster 106 - Remdesivir will be in India soon

(With inputs from Dr Monica Vasudev)917: For hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19, start remdesivir if available (Grade 1C).918: Remdesivir for the Treatment of COVID-19 — Preliminary ReportA double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of intravenous remdesivir was conducted in adults hospitalized with COVID-19 with evidence of lower respiratory tract involvement. Patients were randomized to receive either remdesivir (200 mg loading dose on day 1, followed by 100 mg daily for up to 9 additional days) or placebo for up to 10 days....read more

Persist in your efforts and you will be successful

All success stories are stories of great failures. The key is that every time they failed, they bounced back. This is termed as failing forward, rather than backward. You learn and move forward. Learn from your failure and keep moving.The third avtara of Vishnu, the boar, signifies the same. The answer is persistence in your objectives. ....read more

Healthcare News Monitor

Glenmark to start new phase 3 clinical trial of Covid-19 drug combination

Hindustan Times- ANI

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals on Tuesday announced a new randomised, open-label study to test the combined efficacy of two antiviral drugs Favipiravir and Umifenovir as a potential Covid-19 treatment strategy. The two antiviral drugs have a different mechanism of action, and their combination may demonstrate improved treatment efficacy by effectively tackling high viral loads in patients during an early stage of the disease, said the pharma major in a statement. Monika Tandon, Vice President and Head for Clinical Development Global Specialty and Branded Portfolio, said combining antiviral agents that have a good safety profile and act on different stages of viral life-cycle is an effective treatment approach to rapidly suppress initial high viral load and lead to an overall improvement in clinical parameters. “We consider Glenmark’s study will be pivotal in leading to the identification of highly effective and safe treatments against COVID-19 in India,” she said. “Beyond its many potential patient treatment benefits, we also hope the combination therapy will reduce infection risk among medical professionals and healthcare workers by reducing the duration of virus shedding from treated patients.” A total of 158 hospitalised patients of moderate Covid-19 infection will be enrolled in the combination study and randomised in two groups.

Coronavirus | No WHO bar on India testing HCQ as a preventive drug, says WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan

The Hindu- Jacob Koshy & Bindu Shajan Perappadan

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) moratorium on testing hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the controversial anti-malarial drug, for treating COVID-19, which was announced on Monday, doesn’t imply that India should pause testing the drug as a preventive, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, WHO, told The Hindu in an email. However, she stressed that India ought to be doing stricter trials to test the drug’s efficacy in staving off infection in asymptomatic people at high-risk of contracting the virus. HCQ was one of four drug-combinations being tested in a global clinical trial, called Solidarity Trial, coordinated by the WHO. Four hundred hospitals in 35 countries would be comparing the benefits to COVID patients from taking either Remdesivir; Lopinavir/Ritonavir; Lopinavir/Ritonavir with Interferon beta-1a; and hydroxychloroquine. They are all drugs for other diseases but have shown varying degrees of promise in blunting COVID-19 infection. To objectively assess the benefit of these drugs over standard-of-care treatments, clinicians would be assessing these drugs in Randomised Clinical Trial (RCT) — the most medically legitimate approach — whereby some groups of patients, unknown to the administering doctors and recipient patients — would get the drug and some wouldn’t. While these studies are in progress and still actively recruiting patients, a spate of studies have shown that HCQ shows no benefit — in fact, it puts patients at greater harm. The latest such study published in the medical journal Lancet found that in 96,000 hospitalised SARS-CoV-2 patients across six continents, there was no benefit — even additional harm of cardiac arrhythmia — in those being treated with HCQ.

States turn to out-of-the-box options to cope with shortage of doctors, nurses

Mint- Neetu Chandra Sharma

Rapidly rising covid-19 cases have stretched India’s frayed healthcare system, prompting government health authorities to turn to the private sector or even other states. The four states that are the worst hit by the pandemic in India—Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Delhi —have been forced to consider out-of-the-box options as they find themselves struggling to cope with a surge in patients needing ever more doctors, nurses and paramedics. Last week, Maharashtra ordered municipal commissioners and district collectors of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region to take charge of 80% of beds in private hospitals, while capping treatment costs till 31 August. Additionally, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), anticipating a further spike in cases, said it is setting up 100,000 beds for coronavirus patients, and doubling the number of ICU beds to 1,000. And on Sunday, the state sought Kerala’s assistance in managing the pandemic in Mumbai, requesting 50 doctors and 100 nurses from the southern state to buttress the efforts of around 5,000 doctors called in to the capital from other districts of Maharashtra. “A lot of hospitals did not have special facilities required for covid treatment, like negative isolation wards and ICUs with ventilators, quarantine facilities with oxygen supply and normal quarantine facilities. These had to be set up when the pandemic began," said Gautam Khanna, chief executive of PD Hinduja Hospital & Medical Research Centre, Mumbai.

Odisha paediatrician becomes first doctor in the state to contract coronavirus

Hindustan Times- Debabrata Mohanty

In the first-ever case of a doctor getting infected by Covid-19 in Odisha, a paediatrician employed in a government hospital of Cuttack city has been diagnosed with the coronavirus. The doctor engaged at the district headquarters hospital, popularly known as the City Hospital, was admitted to the Ashwini Covid Hospital in Cuttack after his tests came out positive. The doctor had recently visited Kendrapara to bring back his wife. His wife will also undergo Covid-19 testing. Meanwhile, the district administration has constituted a team to carry out contact tracing to identify people who came in contact with the doctor. A few days ago a constable of Odisha police in Bhubaneshwar had tested positive for the disease, becoming the first Covid case in the police force. So far, a total of 1,517 persons in Odisha have tested positive for the disease.