As well as the saltshaker, in that instant, they shared the new coronavirus, scientists have since concluded. That their exchange was documented at all is the result of intense scrutiny, part of a rare success story in the global fight against the virus. The co-workers were early links in what was to be the first documented chain of multiple human-to-human transmissions outside Asia of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

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Background

As of March 18, 2020, 13 415 confirmed cases and 120 deaths related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in mainland China, outside Hubei province—the epicentre of the outbreak—had been reported. Since late January, massive public health interventions have been implemented nationwide to contain the outbreak. We provide an impact assessment of the transmissibility and severity of COVID-19 during the first wave in mainland Chinese locations outside Hubei.

Methods<...

Not all patients with severe COVID-19 infection may benefit from a ventilator.

Some physicians caring for COVID-19 patients question whether the threshold for placing someone on a ventilator should be raised, given that the breathing machines are in critically short supply nationwide, Stat News reported.







"I think we may indeed be able to support a subset of these patients" with less invasive breathing support, Dr. Sohan Japa, an internal medicine physicia...

Google has created a website full of information resources related to COVID-19 disease. 
There you will find health information about symptoms, prevention, treatment, and propagation; security advices, tendencies of the pandemics all over the world, help resources to keep learning, teaching or working; and a donation fund.
Click here to access google.com/covid19

Developed by the American College of Surgeons, American Society of Anesthesiologists, and Association of periOperative Registered Nurses.

The COVID-19 crisis is requiring hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers throughout the country to defer nonessential surgery to preserve personal protective equipment (PPE), protect the safety of health care professionals, and allocate potentially scarce resources for the care of the COVID-19 patient. In the past week, the American College of S...

The American College of Surgeons (ACS) published a guidance about how to properly set up a RMOC, a Regional Medical Operations Center. It is a single point of shared situational awareness and information that can implement effective command and control for the medical response to a large-scale mass casualty incident. The RMOC allows coordination across all EMS agencies, hospitals, public health representatives, and emergency management leaderships. Therefore, it allows for a better communicat...

We report the observation that 14.5% of COVID-19 patients had positive RT-PCR testing again after discharge. We describe correlations between laboratory parameters and treatment duration (r= -0.637; p=0.002) and time to virus recrudescence (r= 0.52; p=0.008) respectively, suggesting the need for additional measures to confirm illness resolution in COVID-19 patients.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a guidance for US healthcare professionals to prepare their facilities in front of the Covid-19 Pandemic. This interim guidance outlines goals and strategies for all U.S. facilities to respond to community spread of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19).
Click here for the full Guidance. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps into South Africa, the decades the country has spent fighting the world’s worst combined epidemic of tuberculosis (TB) and HIV could give it an advantage. But those infections could also worsen the pandemic’s impact.

By 6 April, South Africa had 1686 confirmed COVID-19 infections, the highest number on the continent—and that is almost certainly an undercount. At the same time, one in every five people aged 15 to 49 is HIV positive and two to three pe...

Palliative care services are under-resourced at the best of times. The 2017 Lancet Commission on Palliative Care and Pain Relief described the widespread lack of access to inexpensive and effective interventions as a travesty of justice. And these are not the best of times. As health systems become strained under COVID-19, providing safe and effective palliative care, including end-of-life care, becomes especially vital and especially difficult.

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The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES), together with the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery (EAES) have published a list of resources with some safe gas evacuation techniques to use during the Covid-19 Pandemic. It is constantly updated with the improvements they find out. 
Click here to visit the guidelines. 

The European Association for Endoscopic Surgery and other Interventional Techniques (EAES) posted general guidelines about urgent surgical care. They are an English summary of all the recommendations that the Spanish Association of Surgeons (AEC) has been publishing last weeks. There, you can find the original documents attached. Click here for the guidelines.