The COVID-19 pandemic is straining health systems worldwide. The rapidly increasing demand on health facilities and health care workers threatens to leave some health systems overstretched and unable to operate effectively.




Previous outbreaks have demonstrated that when health systems are overwhelmed, mortality from vaccine-preventable and other treatable conditions can also increase dramatically. During the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, the increased number of deaths cause...

The infection-control measures put in place in many European countries – such as national lockdowns – are reducing the spread of the coronavirus. Across 11 countries in Western and Northern Europe, between 21,000 and 120,000 deaths will probably have been avoided by the end of March, according to a new model by a group at Imperial College London. The study, published by the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team on 30 March, estimates the effects that non-pharmaceutical interventions, which ...

Pregnant women infected with Covid-19 were evaluated to provide future help for clinical prevention and treatment. All the cases were from Hospital of Hubei Province and had the gestational week from 38th weeks to 41th weeks. Their primary initial manifestations were merely low-grade postpartum fever or mild respiratory symptoms. 




As a conclusion, these doctors stated that the protective measures are necessary on admission, and the instant CT scan and real-time ...

Architects have designed mobile hospitals in order to provide intensive care to the patients of coronavirus, which can increase their chance of survival.

An Italian design company has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create prefabricated intensive care units (ICUs), to deal with escalating numbers of coronavirus patients around the world.
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Via Science, Jocelyn Kaiser write: How sick will the coronavirus make you? The answer may be in your genes
COVID-19, caused by the new pandemic coronavirus, is strangely—and tragically—selective. Only some infected people get sick, and although most of the critically ill are elderly or have complicating problems such as heart disease, some killed by the disease are previously healthy and even relatively young. Researchers are now gearing up to scour the patients’ genomes for DNA variations...

The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) has launched a regularly updated document that represents a resource for smoke and gas evacuation based on known science, vetted publications, and potential strategies. The aim is to offer the best protection to both patients and the health care team. 


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WHO is gathering the latest scientific findings and knowledge on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and compiling it in a database. 
The database is updated daily from searches of bibliographic databases, hand searches of the table of contents of relevant journals, and the addition of other relevant scientific articles that come to our attention. The entries in the database may not be exhaustive and new research will be added regularly.

You can search the WHO database of publications on...

Via Science, Martin Enserink and Kai Kupferschmidt write: With COVID-19, modeling takes on life and death importance
Jacco Wallinga's computer simulations are about to face a high-stakes reality check. Wallinga is a mathematician and the chief epidemic modeler at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), which is advising the Dutch government on what actions, such as closing schools and businesses, will help control the spread of the novel coronavirus in the coun...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic spread within China, and secondarily also outside China, with a basic reproductive number estimated to be from to and a mortality rate of around 2-3%. In the EU (and European Economic Area) and the UK, as of March 6, 2020, 5544 cases have been reported (423 in France), including 159 deaths (seven in France).
So far, several studies have described demographic, clinical, and biological characteristics of patients with COVID-19, and radiologica...

Via MIT NEWS, David L. Chandler write: MIT-based team works on rapid deployment of open-source, low-cost ventilator
Clinical and design considerations will be published online; goal is to support rapid scale-up of device production to alleviate hospital shortages.
One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000 each...

As of this week, South Korea had just over 9,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, which puts it among the top 10 countries for total cases.

But South Korea has another distinction: Health experts are noting that recently the nation has managed to significantly slow the number of new cases. And the country appears to have reined in the outbreak without some of the strict lockdown strategies deployed elsewhere in the world.

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Anecdotal reports have been circulating for weeks that Covid-19 can cause people to lose their sense of smell. This week, the idea gained credibility with the British Association of Otorhinolaryngology suggesting that so-called anosmia could be a useful symptom for screening for the virus, based on reports from South Korea, China and Italy, and higher than usual numbers reporting the complaint in UK clinics. On Monday, World Health Organization officials also said they were also looking i...