HIV and ID Observations

September 13th, 2020

Restaurants Are Hurting — But Dining Indoors Poses Real COVID-19 Risk

As we learn more about transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the news for restaurants goes from bad to worse. And while there’s a long list of sad things about this pandemic, the decimation of the restaurant business for owners and the people who work there is right up there. The loss of the restaurant experience for us diners […]

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September 7th, 2020

Relieving the COVID-19 Testing Logjam by Separating the Symptomatic from Asymptomatic

As the days grow shorter and we celebrate Labor Day here in the United States, the end of summer looms awfully near. With that will soon come colder temperatures, more time spent indoors, kids back in school, and the inevitable respiratory virus season. How we address these “viral URIs” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic […]

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August 30th, 2020

Cases of SARS-CoV-2 Reinfection Highlight the Limitations — and the Mysteries — of Our Immune System

In case you didn’t notice, or perhaps were “off the grid” taking some well-earned time away from COVID-19 news, this past week we heard about several cases of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection. We’ll come back to them in a moment, but first, some questions: Why does one parent never get sick when their kids start coughing and sneezing and […]

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August 24th, 2020

FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for Convalescent Plasma for COVID-19 Seems To Be Fooling No One

Starting late Saturday night, and proceeding the next day — like a relentless series of coming attractions for a blockbuster summer movie or the finale of a reality TV series — we repeatedly heard word that the President planned to make an announcement Sunday evening about a “major therapeutic breakthrough” in treatment of COVID-19. 6 p.m. […]

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August 9th, 2020

Rapid Home Testing for Contagious COVID-19: How to Make It Happen

You know that feeling when you have an aha moment. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, we can’t do better than our friends from Merriam-Webster: aha moment (noun):  a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension This is how I felt when research revealed three key findings related to COVID-19 transmission: A small number […]

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August 4th, 2020

Carbapenems and Pseudomonas, Lyme and Syphilis Testing, a Bonus Point for Doxycycline, and Some Other ID Stuff We’ve Been Talking About on Rounds

As noted multiple times, many of us ID doctors attend on the general medical service. This offers us a chance to broaden our patient care activities and to work with medical students, interns, and residents. Boy, that’s fun! Yes, those of us who attend on medicine enjoy it enormously, though the experience humbles us on a daily […]

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July 19th, 2020

Reaching Out to ID Doctors in COVID-19 Hot Spots — You Must Be Truly Exhausted

For us ID doctors in most of the northeastern United States (and Chicago and Detroit and some other northern cities), March and April hit us like a giant wave of never-ending calls, pages, emails, and crises. With COVID-19 case numbers increasing every day, the challenges crashed down on us in an endless torrent of hospital needs […]

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June 7th, 2020

Hydroxychloroquine Not Effective in Preventing COVID-19 — In Praise of a Negative Clinical Trial

The headlines might read, Malaria Drug Ineffective in Preventing COVID-19 — but that doesn’t do justice to a remarkable clinical trial, just published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Led by Dr. David Boulware at the University of Minnesota, the study asked this question:  Does hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) prevent the development of COVID-19 in people […]

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May 31st, 2020

America the Not So Beautiful Right Now, with a Must-Read Book Suggestion

Have you read W. Kamau Bell’s The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell:  Tales of a 6′ 4″, African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama’s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian? If you haven’t, may I suggest you put it at the top of your list, and pronto? In addition to being funny, […]

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May 25th, 2020

A Major Advance in Non-COVID-19 ID Research You Might Have Missed

One thing about the COVID-19 pandemic — other important non-COVID ID news gets crowded out. As a prime example, take HPTN 083, a major clinical trial in HIV prevention. The results are a big deal, and should have garnered more attention when they were released last week. This randomized, double-blind pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) study compared long-acting injectable […]

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