Articles: sars-cov-2.
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J Infect Public Health · Jul 2020
Forecasting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia using ARIMA prediction model under current public health interventions.
The substantial increase in the number of daily new cases infected with coronavirus around the world is alarming, and several researchers are currently using various mathematical and machine learning-based prediction models to estimate the future trend of this pandemic. In this work, we employed the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model to forecast the expected daily number of COVID-19 cases in Saudi Arabia in the next four weeks. ⋯ This indicates that the Umrah and Hajj Pilgrimages to the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia that are supposedly scheduled to be performed by nearly 2 million Muslims in mid-July may be suspended. A set of extreme preventive and control measures are proposed in an effort to avoid such a situation.
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At the population level, the virus-host relationship is not set up to end with the complete elimination of either or both. Pathogen-resistant individuals will always remain in the host population. In turn, the virus can never completely eliminate the host population, because evolutionarily such an event is a dead end for the virus as an obligate intracellular parasite. ⋯ In this article, we will concentrate on the facts currently available about severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which has caused COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic and try to predict its development and consequences based on the virus-host relationship. In fact, only two scenarios will occur simultaneously in the very near future: people who are genetically resistant to the virus will get sick, recover, and develop immunity, while people who are sensitive to the virus will need drugs and vaccines, which will have to be researched and developed if they are to recover. If the pandemic does not stop, in a few decades it is anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 will become as safe as the four non-severe acute respiratory syndrome human coronaviruses (HCoV-NL63, HCoV-HKU1, HCoV-OC43, and HCoV-229E) currently circulating but causing low mortality in the human population.
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Clinical biochemistry · Jul 2020
Case Reports2019 Novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in hemodialysis patients: A report of two cases.
To analyze the diagnosis and treatment of patients with chronic renal failure complicated with novel coronavirus pneumonia, and to evaluate the effect of blood purification technology on the treatment and prognosis of such patients. ⋯ Two COVID-19 patients on maintenance hemodialysis discharged after a month of hospitalization. The removal of cytokines through blood purification technology may be beneficial for the recovery of COVID-19 patients.
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The final months of 2019 witnessed the emergence of a novel coronavirus in the human population. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has since spread across the globe and is posing a major burden on society. Measures taken to reduce its spread critically depend on timely and accurate identification of virus-infected individuals by the most sensitive and specific method available, i.e. real-time reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR). ⋯ Using clinical samples, we observed some variations in detection rate between kits. Importantly, none of the assays showed cross-reactivity with other respiratory (corona)viruses, except as expected for the SARS-CoV-1 E-gene. We conclude that all RT-PCR kits assessed in this study may be used for routine diagnostics of COVID-19 in patients by experienced molecular diagnostic laboratories.
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At present, neither specific curative treatment nor vaccines for novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) are available. There is an urgent need to look for alternative strategies for COVID-19 treatment especially in the case of severe and/or critically ill patients with cytokine release syndrome (CRS). ⋯ Our experience indicates that convalescent plasma therapy is well tolerated and could potentially improve clinical outcomes. Optimal dose and timing as well as precise assessment of clinical benefit of convalescent plasma therapy will need further investigation in larger, well-controlled trials. This is the first report of the successful use of convalescent plasma in the treatment of critically ill patients with COVID-19 infection in Hungary. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(27): 1111-1121.