A CT scan for COVID merits a word of caution
Updated:
Updated:
May 06, 2021 01:48 IST
Going by data and the risk factors, its widespread use in diagnosing the infectious disease needs to be questioned
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Going by data and the risk factors, its widespread use in diagnosing the infectious disease needs to be questioned
There are broadly three reasons why we perform tests in clinical medicine: diagnosis (what is the disease?), etiognosis (what caused a disease?), and prognosis (how will the disease evolve?). It is also important that the outcome of a test should guide treatment in some way, especially when it is being touted as being a monitoring test that provides unique information that cannot be obtained by easier means. Considering how widespread the use of computerised tomography (CT) scans of the thorax during the novel coronavirus pandemic has been, one would assume that the test would satisfy one, if not all the above criteria, for an accurate diagnostic t
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was able to neutralize a potentially more contagious variant of the virus that was first discovered in Brazil, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.Why it matters: The results come as experts warn that several new variants — which are already present in the U.S. — could create a new surge in coronavirus cases and prolong the pandemic.Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.Details: People who were fully vaccinated were given an engineered version of the virus that had a similar mutation to the Brazilian strain. Researchers found that the neutralization of the strain was "roughly equivalent" to that of the original, less contagious strain of the virus.The study also confirmed that the vaccine is effective against the U.K. variant of the virus.The New England Journal of Medicine had previously released other studies that found that both the Pfizer and Moderna v