Media Coverage

Dr. Martha Twaddle, medical director for palliative medicine and supportive care at Northwestern Medicine-Lake Forest Hospital, tells Yahoo Life that the pandemic has completely changed the practice of palliative care. “Palliative care focuses on the seriously ill and their families, looking at patients and family as a unit of care,” she says. “Before the pandemic, families were very much an integrated part of the team. On rounds they would be bedside. That doesn’t happen now.”

“Basically the whole idea for this is like an early warning system. What we would hope to do with this is to … be able to see when things are starting to stoke and an outbreak is occurring,” said Lori Post, co-lead investigator and director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “However, it’s really a difficult time just because all U.S. states are just like out of control right now in America,” said Post, a professor of emergency medicine and medical social sciences.

“If there are no beds in the hospital, they (patients) are stuck in the waiting room or the emergency department sometimes for hours,” said Dr. Aaron Quarles, an emergency medicine physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Pregnant women are commonly excluded from research, something that has frustrated Dr. Emily Miller for years. Miller is the assistant professor in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Northwestern Medicine’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she has been closely following the lack of data on pregnant women and new vaccines.

According to study senior author Dr. Scott Budinger, professor and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Northwestern, lungs attacked by COVID-19 “also showed striking similarities to the lungs of patients with a condition called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.” In that condition, lung tissue gets “thick and stiff, making it difficult for the body to take in oxygen,” Budinger said in the news release.

“The C.D.C. will have to be rebuilt, and its guidelines and the F.D.A.’s have to be promptly re-evaluated,” said Dr. Robert L. Murphy, director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University’s medical school. “The Biden team will move quickly. It’s not like they don’t know what to do.”

Lori Post is a professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University who closely surveils COVID-19 data. She is expecting a “God awful” upward spike in cases about a week from now. There’s quite a few risk factors at play as the pandemic is accelerating all across the country.[…]Marc Sala is a pulmonologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Part of his job is managing ventilators for patients with COVID-19.

[VIDEO:] Hospitalizations on Thanksgiving hit a record high for the 17th straight day. Hospitals were already overwhelmed ahead of the holiday, and by next week nearly a quarter could face a staffing shortage.

“What makes people hesitant? They’re not sure it will work. Sometimes it’s about side effects. They want to know that it is indeed going to protect them, and that’s a message that we need to make sure we get out there,” said Kenzie Cameron, a research professor in general internal medicine and geriatrics at Northwestern Medicine. Cameron is a health services researcher with a background that includes health communication, and has studied racial and ethnic disparities in the flu vaccine.

Wegg was sent to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where surgeon Dr. Ankit Bharat and his team performed the procedure. Another surgeon, Dr. Sam Kim, said she was in “terrible shape,” per the outlet. While healthy lungs have a “spongy nature,” Kim said the lungs in these coronavirus transplant patients “stiffen and harden.”