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  • Recommendations For Action In Esophagus-Gastric Oncological Surgery During The Covid-19 Pandemic

    6 Apr, 2020
    The Spanish Association of Surgeons (AEC) has issued a publication on recommendations for action in esophagus-gastric oncological surgery during the Covid-19 pandemic, which includes: 
    Criteria to consider in decision making


    Action scenarios


    Multidisciplinary treatment strategy


    Recommendations for surgery

    Click here for reference


  • Researchers at IBEC help identifying a drug in clinical phase that blocks the effects of SARS-Co-V2

    6 Apr, 2020
    IBEC researchers led by ICREA Research Professor Núria Montserrat, together with international collaborators, have identified a drug capable of blocking the effects of the SARS-Co-V2 virus, the origin of the Coronavirus 2019 diseaseThe treatment, which can be tested on two hundred Covid-19 patients as of today, has proven effective in mini-kidneys generated from human stem cells. Using hese organoids generated by bioengineering techniques, it has been deciphered how SARS-Co-V2 interacts and i...
  • Renin–Angiotensin–Aldosterone System Inhibitors in Patients with Covid-19

    3 Apr, 2020

    The Renin-Angiotensin Aldosterone is an elegant cascade of vasoactive peptides that orchestrate key processes in human physiology. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 1 (SARS-CoV-1) and SARS-CoV-2, which have been responsible for the SARS epidemic in 2002 to 2004 and for the more recent coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, respectively, interface with the RAAS through angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), an enzyme that physiologically counters RAAS activation but als...
  • Covid-19 Outbreak: what the department of endoscopy should know

    3 Apr, 2020
    Gastrointestinal endoscopy (GIE) is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering gastroenterology, especially in relation to endoscopy. This journal from ASGE (American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy) published a full article with instructions about how to safely perform an endoscopy during the coronavirus pandemic: different measures implemented in the hospital to prevent further dissemination of COVID-19 infection. The article was written by different Italian doctors who have al...
  • Likelihood of survival of coronavirus disease 2019

    2 Apr, 2020
    A case fatality ratio of an infectious disease measures the proportion of all individuals diagnosed with a disease who will die from that disease. For an emerging infectious disease, this ratio is thus a very important indicator not only of disease severity but also of its significance as a public health problem. For instance, WHO estimated a case fatality ratio of approximately 14–15% for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003,1 and approximately 35% for Middle East resp...
  • Essential care of critical illness must not be forgotten in the COVID-19 pandemic

    2 Apr, 2020

    The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will have a large impact in low-resource settings (LRS). 20% of COVID-19 patients become critically ill with hypoxia or respiratory failure. Critical illness, describing any acute life-threatening condition, is receiving increased attention in global health because of its large disease burden and population impact. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, growing evidence suggested that the care of critical illness was overlooked in LRS—hosp...
  • COVID-19 pandemic in west Africa

    2 Apr, 2020



    The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, which started in the Hubei province of China in 2019, has now spread to all continents, affecting 177 countries by March 27, 2020. Successful efforts in containing the COVID-19 virus in Asia resulted in WHO declaring Europe as the epicentre of the disease on March 13. Whether warmer temperatures will slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has been a point of muc...
  • Structural basis of receptor recognition by SARS-CoV-2

    1 Apr, 2020
    A novel SARS-like coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) recently emerged and is rapidly spreading in humans1,2. A key to tackling this epidemic is to understand the virus’s receptor recognition mechanism, which regulates its infectivity, pathogenesis and host range. SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV recognize the same receptor - human ACE2 (hACE2)3,4. Here we determined the crystal structure of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD) (engineered to facilitate crystallization) in complex with hACE2. Compared wi...
  • Designing Intelligent System for Stratification of COVID-19 Asymptomatic Patients

    1 Apr, 2020
    AbstractThe world is going through a life-threating, a war-like, virus attack called COVID-19. Since its inception in the last four months, it has been increased ten times every two weeks outside mainland China. In this case, we address this challenging human crisis with a focus on the early discovery of coronavirus asymptomatic patients which would help to reduce the cross-infection of COVID-19 that estimates to attack at least 60% of the world population, according to WHO (2020). This p...
  • Quantifying treatment effects of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for COVID-19: a secondary analysis of an open label non-randomized clinical trial (Gautret et al, 2020)

    1 Apr, 2020
    Human infections with a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) were first identified via syndromic surveillance in December of 2019 in Wuhan China. Since identification, infections (coronavirus disease-2019; COVID-19) caused by this novel pathogen have spread globally, with more than 250,000 confirmed cases as of March 21, 2020. An open-label clinical trial has just concluded, suggesting improved resolution of viremia with use of two existing therapies: hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as monotherapy, and in...
  • Report 13: Imperial College

    31 Mar, 2020


    Estimating the number of infections and the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in 11 European countriesSummary  - Click to access full textFollowing the emergence of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its spread outside of China, Europe is now experiencing large epidemics. In response, many European countries have implemented unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions including case isolation, the closure of schools and universities, banning of ma...
  • Experimental AI tool predicts which COVID-19 patients develop respiratory disease

    31 Mar, 2020
    An artificial intelligence tool accurately predicted which patients newly infected with the COVID-19 virus would go on to develop severe respiratory disease, a new study found.


    Towards an Artificial Intelligence Framework for Data-Driven Prediction of Coronavirus Clinical Severity
    AbstractThe virus SARS-CoV2, which causes coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a pandemic and has spread to every inhabited continent. Given the increasing caseload, there is an urgent need to aug...