Editor's Note The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) announced on March 28 that it had honored a request by Pacific PPE Corp to rescind all of its N95 respirator mask approvals, effective immediately. Respirators with NIOSH approval numbers TC-84A-9278, TC-84A-9299, and TC-84A-9313 will no longer be manufactured,…

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Editor's Note The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on March 23, identified the recall by Celltrion USA of certain point of care DiaTrust COVID-19 Ag Rapid Test kits (labeled for research use only) as Class I, the most serious. The recall was initiated because the kits were distributed to customers…

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Editor's Note This multi-center study by cancer centers across the US finds that having cancer and COVID-19 is associated with worse outcomes in Black patients compared with White patients. Of 3,506 patients included in the analysis, 1,068 (30%) were Black and 2,438 (70%) were White. At the time of COVID-19…

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What happens when global supply chains—which are already typically operated lean across the board—are hit with a once-in-a-century pandemic? An ongoing, collective lesson in economics. The problem is not hard to understand: COVID-19 shutdowns brought manufacturing to a near standstill, during which time the demand for goods increased, and now there…

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Editor's Note A December 2021 World Health Organization (WHO) report examines how 19 countries mitigated COVID-19’s effects on providing maternal; newborn; child and adolescent; and aging health services, JAMA Network March 15 reports. The WHO data comes from an initiative lasting from May 2020 to February 2021, during which groups…

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Editor's Note According to a March 14 news release from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) launched a Phase 1 clinical trial evaluating three experimental HIV vaccines using the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. The mRNA technology being tested is the same…

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Editor's Note According to the New York Times, which collected data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, COVID-19 cases have decreased nationwide in the last 2 weeks, Becker’s Hospital Review March 24 reports. However, the same data set shows that the number of COVID-19 cases have actually…

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Editor's Note This Canadian study finds that many cancers went undetected because of disruptions in the healthcare system in response to COVID-19. The week-to-week rate of diagnoses was steady before COVID-19, but fell 34.2% in March 2020, with only a slow recovery of 1% per week during the study period.…

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Editor's Note According to a March 16 Politico article, titled “Some hospitals ask patients, visitors to remove N95s, citing CDC,” some US hospitals are asking patients and visitors to swap their N95 masks with surgical masks or wear a surgical mask over the N95, Becker’s Hospital Review reports. The staff…

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Editor's Note In this study led by researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, increased age was found to be the greatest independent risk factor for COVID-19 associated mortality. Of 7,556 patients included in the analysis, 1,556 died, 949 were admitted to ICU, and 227…

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