Archive for ‘COVID-19 patients’

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17/05/2020

Europe Coronavirus Updates: Italy sees fewer COVID-19 patients, Spanish PM seeks final extension of State of Alarm

A pedestrian waits to cross a street in Brussels, Belgium, May 6, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

— New single-day COVID-19 deaths continue to drop in France

— Italy sees fewer COVID-19 patients, number of active infections falls to 70,187

— New deaths from COVID-19 keep falling in Spain as PM seeks final extension of State of Alarm

— Deaths from coronavirus top 9,000 in Belgium

BRUSSELS, May 16 (Xinhua) — The following are the latest developments of the COVID-19 pandemic in European countries.

A man makes a phone call near the Eiffel Tower at the Trocadero Palace, Paris, France, May 15, 2020. (Xinhua/Gao Jing)

PARIS — France had registered 96 new deaths from COVID-19 over the past 24 hours, fewer than the previous two 24-hour periods, while the balance of the coronavirus-related hospitalization remains negative, France’s Health Ministry said on Saturday.

According to the ministry, the 96 new single-day deaths were lower than 104 registered on Friday and 351 on Thursday. So far, 27,625 people have succumbed to the coronavirus-caused disease across France.

Meanwhile, France is now the world’s fourth worst-hit country in terms of human loss caused by COVID-19 after the United States, Britain and Italy.

As of Saturday, the country had recorded 142,291 confirmed cases, a single-day increase of 372, slower than Friday’s 563. A total of 61,066 patients had recovered and returned home since early March.

People wait in line outside a cocktail bar in Rome, Italy, May 12, 2020. (Xinhua/Cheng Tingting)

ROME — The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations and intensive care (ICU) patients dropped in Italy over the past 24 hours, according to the latest tally posted by the Civil Protection Department on Saturday.

Recoveries rose by 2,605 from a day earlier, bringing the total to 122,810.

Nationwide, the number of active infections fell to 70,187, down from 72,070 on Friday.

Of those who tested positive for the new coronavirus, 775 are in intensive care, down by 33 from Friday, and 10,400 are hospitalized with symptoms, down by 392.

The death toll on Saturday was 153, bringing the total to 31,763 since the outbreak was first recorded in Italy’s northern Lombardy region in February.

The total number of COVID-19 cases combining infections, fatalities and recoveries has risen to 224,760, up from 223,885 on Friday.

A security guard offers disinfectant gel to a woman at the entrance of a building in Barcelona, Spain, on May 11, 2020. (Photo by Sergi Camara/Xinhua)

MADRID — The Spanish Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Welfare confirmed on Saturday falls in the number of new deaths from COVID-19 as well as new cases.

The total number of deaths in Spain rose to 27,563 after 102 people lost their lives to COVID-19 in the 24-hour period until 21:00 hours local time on Friday.

This was the lowest number of deaths in a 24-hour period since March 16, with 50 of the deaths in the regions of Madrid and Catalonia.

The same period also saw a slight fall in the number of new cases. The Health Ministry reported 539 new infections, down from 549 reported 24 hours earlier, taking the total number of confirmed cases to 230,698.

Also on Saturday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he will seek a fifth and final extension of the State of Alarm, which was imposed on March 15 to control the spread of the coronavirus.

Speaking in a televised speech, Sanchez said the upcoming final State of Alarm, which will come into effect on May 24 if approved, will be “different” from others.

“It is expected to be the last State of Alarm. We are going to request in the Congress of Deputies that it should last for a month,” he said. All the previous four extensions have been 15 days.

Few people are seen at the Saint-Hubert Royal Galleries shopping street in Brussels, Belgium, May 6, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

BRUSSELS — With an increase of 47 deaths reported in the last 24 hours, the novel coronavirus had caused a total of 9,005 deaths in Belgium since the beginning of the epidemic, said the public health institute Sciensano on Saturday.

Of the 9,005 deaths, 48 percent took place in hospitals, 51 percent in nursing homes, and about 0.6 percent elsewhere, according to Sciensano. Deaths in hospitals were all confirmed COVID-19 cases. Of the fatalities in nursing homes, 23 percent were confirmed by test while the other were presumed by symptoms.

Also in the past 24 hours, 345 new cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed, raising the cumulative cases to 54,989 in Belgium.

Source: Xinhua

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23/04/2020

TCM effective in treating COVID-19 patients in Wuhan: expert

BEIJING, April 23 (Xinhua) — Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an effective role in treating COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, the central China city hit hard by the epidemic, a medical expert said Thursday.

The first batch of TCM doctors who were sent to Wuhan for assistance had combined TCM and Western medicines to cure 132 patients, successfully reducing the mortality rate and the use of hormone treatment compared with other wards, said Qi Wensheng, a doctor with Guang’anmen Hospital in Beijing under the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, at a press conference.

Some patients hospitalized at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital voluntarily asked for TCM treatment after becoming familiar with it, said Qi.

TCM has different emphases for the early-, middle- and late-stage treatment of COVID-19 patients. Its syndrome differentiation stresses adjusting treatment as patients’ conditions change, Qi said.

He also stressed the importance of regulating emotions and avoiding negative emotions such as anxiety and nervousness for healthy people, as the fluctuation of mental conditions may affect immunity.

In addition, a balanced diet is also important, according to Qi.

Source: Xinhua

Posted in central China city, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, COVID-19 patients, effective role, epidemic, Guang'anmen Hospital, played, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), treating, Uncategorized, Western medicines, Wuhan, Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital | Leave a Comment »

10/04/2020

Coronavirus: Inside India’s busiest Covid-19 hospital

IndoreImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Indore is a bustling commercial city

In early March, 40-year-old Ravi Dosi, a chest specialist in India, saw a baffling surge in patients with respiratory problems at outpatient clinics.

“There was almost a 50% jump in patients with upper respiratory issues and sore throat. They were not responding to antibiotics. Testing was still low and we didn’t really know what was going on,” Dr Dosi, who works at Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences, a 1,156-bed private medical college in the central city of Indore, told me.

Less than a fortnight later, Dr Dosi began seeing an uptick in admissions of Covid-19 patients. Around the end of March, the hospital was receiving 28 infected patients every day.

They had dry cough, fever, and difficulty breathing. Their blood oxygen levels were low. They were reporting loss of taste and smell.

In the first wave of patients, nearly a dozen came from far-flung districts, more than 150km (93 miles) from Indore, a bustling commercial city in Madhya Pradesh state. The state has now become a hotspot, with nearly 400 confirmed infections out of the more than 6,400 infections and nearly 200 deaths across the country so far.

By the second week of April, Dr Dosi and his team of 100 doctors and nearly an equal number of nursing staff working 24/7 in three shifts, were treating 144 Covid-19 patients. (Thirty-one had been treated and sent home already.)

A total of 38 patients were in intensive care. Twenty-one of them were critical. There had been seven deaths. “We are handling the largest number of Covid-19 patients in India,” Vinod Bhandari, a surgeon and chairman of the hospital, told me.

Doctors now believe that the infection was spreading in the community long before the government admitted to it, and testing slowly ramped up. Until two weeks ago, Indian health authorities had been denying community transmission.

SAIMs Hospital Indore
Image caption The hospital in Indore has more than 140 patients

Now a new study by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) using surveillance data from 41 labs in the country has hinted at community transmission: 52 districts in 20 states and union territories reported Covid-19 patients. Some 40% of the cases did not report any history of international travel or contact with a known case. (The survey was based on swabs collected from nearly 6,000 patients who tested positive between 15 February and 19 March.)

Back in the hospital in Indore, the doctors are battling the surge in infections.

Three isolation wards spread over two floors floors are stacked with patients. (The hospital has earmarked 525 beds for Covid-19 patients.) Isolation wards have younger patients with mild infection, while elderly patients with more severe symptoms are in intensive care. The oldest patient is a 95-year-old man, and the youngest is a four-month-old boy.

The team of doctors handling patients includes chest specialists, anaesthetists, microbiologists, and dermatologists. There are patients with a lot of underlying medical conditions – diabetes, hypertension, even cancer – so all the specialists have been called in to help with the treatment.

Dr Dosi wakes up early, puts on protective gear – scrubs, face masks and shields, N95 masks, gowns, double gloves and shoe covers – before going on his rounds of the patients. Doctors say they are not facing a shortage of gear yet.

They are using 22 ventilators to help the critical patients breathe, and also providing oxygen supplies to others using nasal cannulas (nose prongs).

In the isolation wards, patients are given oral medication – antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine (commonly known as HCQ), an anti-malarial drug – and directed to maintain social distancing and wash their hands regularly.

Isolation wards
Image caption The isolation wards are packed with patients

“I have never seen a challenge and crisis like this in my career. I have heard stories about an outbreak of plague in Surat [in 1994]. But this seems to be much bigger. The biggest challenge is to keep hopes alive and be positive,” says Dr Dosi.

Keeping hopes up for patients in isolation can be taxing. Three tests, say doctors, are being done for the infection – if the first test comes out positive, the patient remains in isolation for two weeks, and is tested twice on two days after the quarantine period. If the last two tests come back negative, the patient is discharged. If not, the patient has to stay in isolation for another two weeks. “It is a tough grind, mentally,” says one doctor.

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For the last three weeks, Dr Dosi has been living in the hospital, away from his wife, two sons and parents. His father is a retired pathologist. They communicate via hurried video calls, between his frantic trips to the isolation wards and intensive care.

I ask him when does he expect this to “get over”, so that he can go home.

“In a couple of weeks,” he says. “The lockdown should have helped to slow down the infection.”

Dr Dosi is alluding to the strict 21-day lockdown India imposed on 24 March to halt the spread of the infection.

migrant workerImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Health officials have been denying community transmission

Things are getting better, he says.

“I am getting 10 patients for admission in isolation wards, and two patients severe enough for intensive care every day now. Earlier this week, it was 50:50.”

It is possibly too early to hazard a guess about when admissions will slow down to single digits. As more people are tested, the number of patients can easily rise again.

It’s been unrelenting, Dr Dosi says.

Early, on Friday, I sent him a text to find out what was going on.

“Please. Have an emergency in ICU,” he replied.

Source: The BBC

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01/04/2020

Coronavirus: India’s race to build a low-cost ventilator to save Covid-19 patients

Patients on ventilators in an Indian hospitalImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption India has an estimated 48,000 ventilators and most of them are already in use

In an 8,000 sq ft (743 sq m) facility in the western Indian city of Pune, a bunch of young engineers are racing against time to develop a low-cost ventilator that could save thousands of lives if the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms the country’s hospitals.

These engineers – from some of India’s top engineering schools – belong to a barely two-year-old start-up which makes water-less robots that clean solar plants.

Last year, Nocca Robotics had a modest turnover of 2.7 million rupees ($36,000; £29,000). The average age of the mechanical, electronic and aerospace engineers who work for the firm is 26.

India, by most estimates, only has 48,000 ventilators. Nobody quite knows how many of these breathing assistance machines are working. But it is a fair assumption that all those available are being used in intensive care units on existing patients with other diseases.

About one in six people with Covid-19 gets seriously ill, which can include breathing difficulties. The country faces seeing its hospitals hobbled as others around the world have been, with doctors forced to choose who they try to save.

At least two Indian companies make ventilators at present, mostly from imported components. They cost around 150,000 ($1,987; £1,612) rupees each. One of them, AgVa Healthcare, plans to make 20,000 in a month’s time. India has also ordered 10,000 from China, but that will meet just a fraction of the potential demand.

The invasive ventilator being developed by the engineers at Nocca Robotics will cost 50,000 rupees ($662). Within five days of beginning work, a group of seven engineers at the start-up have three prototypes of a portable machine ready.

They are being tested on artificial lungs, a prosthetic device that provides oxygen and removes carbon dioxide from the blood. By 7 April, they plan to be ready with machines that can be tested on patients after approvals.

India hospitalImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption India is beefing up isolation beds in hospitals

“It is most certainly doable,” said Dr Deepak Padmanabhan, a cardiologist at Bangalore’s Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research, and a key advisor on this project. “The simulations on artificial lungs have been done and seem to work well.”

Inspiring story

The race to develop this inexpensive, home-grown invasive breathing machine is an inspiring story of swift coordination and speedy action involving public and private institutions, something not common in India.

“The pandemic has brought us all together in ways I could never imagine,” says Amitabha Bandyopadhyay, a professor of biological sciences and bioengineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, and a key mover of the project.

The young engineers mined open source medical supplies groups on the internet to find information on how to make the ventilators. After securing permissions, it took them exactly eight hours to produce the first prototype. Of particular use, say doctors, were some designs by engineers at MIT. With imports stalled, the engineers picked up pressure sensors – a key component of the machine that helps supply oxygen to lungs at a pressure that doesn’t cause injury – from those used in drones and available in the market.

India hospitalImage copyright AFP
Image caption India needs thousands of ventilators to cope with a possible rush of patients

Local authorities helped open firms that stock components – each machine needs 150 to 200 parts – and made sure that a bunch of engineers who had returned home to Nanded after the lockdown were still able to travel 400km (248 miles) back to Pune to work on the machine.

Some leading Indian industrialists, including a major medical device-making company, have offered their factories to manufacture the machines. The plan is to make 30,000 ventilators, at around 150-200 a day, by the middle of May.

Social media influencers joined the effort. Rahul Raj, a lithium battery-maker and an IIT alumnus, crowd-sourced a group called Caring Indians to “pool resources and experience” to cope with the pandemic. Within 24 hours, 1,000 people had signed up. “We tweeted to the local lawmaker and local police in Pune to help the developers, and made contacts with people who would be interested in the project,” Mr Raj said.

‘No-frills machine’

Expat Indian doctors and entrepreneurs who went to the same school – IIT is India’s leading engineering school and alumni include Google chief Sundar Pichai – held Zoom meetings with the young developers, advising them and asking questions about the machine’s development. The head of a US-based company gave them a 90-minute lecture on how to manage production. A former chief of an info-tech company told them how to source the components.

Lastly, a bunch of doctors vetted every development and asked hard questions. In the end, more than a dozen top professionals – pulmonologists, cardiologists, scientists, innovators, venture capitalists – have guided the young team.

Doctors say the goal is to develop a “no-frills” breathing machine tailored to Indian conditions.

Ventilators depend on pressurised oxygen supply from hospital plants. But in a country where piped oxygen is not available in many small towns and villages, developers are seeing whether they can also make the machine run on oxygen cylinders. “In a way we are trying to de-modernise the machine to what it was barely 20 years ago,” says Dr Padmanabhan.

“We are not experienced. But we are very good at making products easily. The robots that we make are much more complex to make. But this is a life-saving machine and carries risk, so we have to be very, very careful that we develop a perfect product which clears all approvals,” said Nikhil Kurele, the 26-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer of Nocca Robotics.

In just a week’s time, India will learn whether they pulled off the feat.

Graphic showing two common types of medical ventilation
Presentational white space

Source: The BBC

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13/03/2020

Coronavirus: Chinese supercomputer uses artificial intelligence to diagnose patients from chest scans

  • System analyses hundreds of images in seconds, then advises doctors what to do next
  • China has offered free use of the machine around the world, but US Centres for Disease Control says it does not recommend using scans to diagnose Covid-19
Chinese doctors are using AI to help them diagnose Covid-19 patients. Photo: AFP
Chinese doctors are using AI to help them diagnose Covid-19 patients. Photo: AFP
A supercomputer in China offers doctors around the world free access to an artificial intelligence diagnostic tool for early identification of Covid-19 patients based on a chest scan.
The AI system on the Tianhe-1 computer can go through hundreds of images generated by computed tomography (CT) and gave a diagnosis in about 10 seconds, according to the National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin, which hosts the machine.
An employee at the facility said the results could then be used to help medical professionals – especially those in areas that have limited test kits or are hit by a sudden increase in suspected cases – to quickly distinguish between patients infected with the novel coronavirus and those with common pneumonia or another illness.
The accuracy of the analysis was higher than 80 per cent “and increasing steadily every day”, he said.

The system has an English interface and the reports it produces direct doctors to those areas of the patient’s lungs that require special attention by circling them in different colours.

It also provides an estimate of the likelihood of the person having contracted Covid-19, in a range from zero to 10, with lower numbers suggesting a higher probability of infection.

It even advises on what to do next, based on the experiences and lessons learned from doctors who have treated coronavirus patients.

Dr Xu Bo, a lead scientist on the project at Tianjin Medical University, said in an interview this week with   Science and Technology Daily   that the accuracy of the system was initially “rather poor”.

But the team worked round the clock to train the machine using the latest information from doctors with experience of Covid-19 and their clinical practices, he said.

The AI system directs doctors to those areas of the patient’s lungs that require special attention by circling them in different colours. Photo: Handout
The AI system directs doctors to those areas of the patient’s lungs that require special attention by circling them in different colours. Photo: Handout
As the number of samples increased, the AI’s performance improved significantly, and is now helping medical teams fighting the coronavirus in more than 30 hospitals in Wuhan and other cities.

Xu said that it would take an experienced doctor about 15 minutes to go through the 300 images generated by a CT scan, while the AI did the job in about 10 seconds.

The system could be accessed via a computer or even a mobile phone, he said.

The use of chest scans for diagnosis was first proposed by doctors fighting the Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan. After the city went into lockdown, a large number of suspected patients appeared and testing them for infection using genetic methods took from several hours to several days. Many people are thought to have died while waiting for their results to come back.

In a series of studies, including a paper published in medical journal The Lancet, Chinese doctors showed that CT scans were a reliable tool because the lungs of coronavirus patients had features unseen in other diseases.

The Chinese government accepted their advice and said scan results could be used as credentials for treatment. Many scientists have said that decision played an important role in controlling the outbreak in the country.

But not all countries agree with that methodology. The US Centres for Disease Control, for instance, “does not currently recommend CXR or CT to diagnose Covid-19”.

It said the reason was that using scans would attract more suspected cases to hospitals and in turn raise the likelihood of them infecting other patients and staff.

The American College of Radiology said: “CT should not be used to screen for or as a first-line test to diagnose Covid-19.”

After the device was used on a suspected patient, it could take an hour to clean the test room, the college said on Wednesday.

A doctor working at a Beijing hospital treating Covid-19 patients said the CT machine could scan hundreds of patients a day in China, but because of the different protocols in some Western countries, the number there fell to just one or two.

“Governments should not let the CT sit idle during a major public health crisis,” she said.

“If you can’t give the people a test, give them a scan.”

Source: SCMP

Posted in American College of Radiology, Artificial intelligence, beijing hospital, chest scans, Chinese, computed tomography (CT), coronavirus, COVID-19 patients, diagnose, National Supercomputer Centre, patients, Science and Technology Daily, supercomputer, Tianhe-1 computer, Tianjin, Tianjin Medical University, Uncategorized, US Centres for Disease Control, Western countries, Wuhan | Leave a Comment »

09/03/2020

Majority of over 50,000 recovered COVID-19 patients in China receive TCM treatment: official

BEIJING, March 9 (Xinhua) — Most of the more than 50,000 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients in China who have recovered and been discharged from hospital received traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment, a health official said Monday.

Yu Yanhong, deputy head of the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, told a press conference that the combination of TCM and Western medicine in COVID-19 treatment has been proved effective by the huge number of recovered patients.

TCM has been involved in the treatment of 74,603 confirmed COVID-19 cases nationwide, accounting for 92.5 percent of the total, according to official data.

Compared with those only treated with TCM or Western medicine, an expert team confirmed that the integrated treatment of TCM and Western medicine can more quickly improve the symptoms such as fever, cough and fatigue, as well as effectively reduce the chances of mild and regular symptoms developing into severe or critical ones, so as to improve the recovery rate and reduce the mortality rate.

TCM treatment focuses on improving the body’s natural defenses against an epidemic and its own ability to repair itself while maintaining the overall balance, Yu said.

TCM clinical treatment is personalized and targeted based on the differences in geography, climate and a patient’s physical condition, said Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the National Health Commission.

A circular issued by the commission also encouraged the promotion of effective TCM treatment plans at the community-level epidemic prevention and control, giving full play to the unique role of TCM.

Source: Xinhua

Posted in China, COVID-19, COVID-19 patients, majority, National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, National Health Commission, natural defenses, TCM treatment, treatment, Uncategorized, Western medicine | Leave a Comment »

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