Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Seizures, Hallucinations And Other Neurological Symptoms Could Help Unlock Some Of COVID-19's Mysteries
A patient in Japan had seizures. An airline worker ended up in a Detroit hospital, where doctors diagnosed her with a rare form of brain damage. Others reported auditory and visual hallucinations or losing their sense of smell and taste. What they share: presumed or confirmed coronavirus infections. As the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide reaches 2 million, clinicians are realizing the disease doesn’t just ravage the lungs and hurt the heart. It also can, in a significant proportion of cases, affect the nervous system in myriad little-understood ways. (Hernandez, 4/14)
The images are compelling: Fire trucks in Tehran or Manila spray the streets. Amazon tests a disinfectant fog inside a warehouse, hoping to calm workers’ fears and get them back on the job. TV commercials show health care workers cleaning chairs where blood donors sat. Families nervously wipe their mail and newly delivered groceries. These efforts may help people feel like they and their government are combating the coronavirus. (Weintraub, 4/14)
The COVID-19 outbreak that has infected more than half a million Americans is killing people or causing them to become seriously ill at vastly different rates in different states, baffling scientists who are still learning about the coronavirus that causes the illness. The virus so far has killed at least 23,529 people in the United States, a case fatality rate of just over 4 percent. (Wilson, 4/14)
Roughly one in three people across the United States, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Argentina and South Korea say they've seen false or misleading information on social media linked to the coronavirus, according to a new report. The analysis, published Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, comes as Facebook and Google say they've pulled out all the stops to clamp down on how misinformation about Covid-19 is shared on their networks. (Scott, 4/15)
As President Trump and governors across the nation spar over when and how to safely reopen the country, one crucial part of the equation is testing. But as more Americans are tested for the coronavirus, concern about the accuracy of those tests is growing. False negatives could distort our understanding of where we stand in the crisis. (Hobson and Hagan, 4/14)
