Media Coverage

A new antibody-based drug shows promise in treating outpatients who have mild to severe COVID-19, according to initial results of research conducted in part at Cook County Health and Northwestern University.

Dr. Seth Trueger is tired of the pandemic. He misses his regular breakfast restaurant, which he now passes without stopping because of the risk of eating indoors. He misses his beard, which is now shaved because he wears masks every day. And he misses the old version of his job, when he didn’t have to calculate the risk of possible death with every action.Trueger is an emergency room doctor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he has been on the front lines of COVID-19 since it was declared a pandemic in March.

“It’s baked into the system,” says Melissa Simon, vice chair for clinical research at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and founding director of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at Northwestern. Once flawed research is published, she says, it can have a chilling effect on other scientists and create distrust among patients who might turn down the opportunity to participate in research studies and clinical trials. “Clearly there are papers out there that potentially do harm to advancing science.”

“(Outdoor dining) is definitely safer than indoor dining,” wrote Robert Murphy, executive director of Northwestern University’s Institute for Global Health and a professor of infectious diseases at the Feinberg School of Medicine, in an email. “The issue is who you are dining with because you will be pretty close while you eat. The more air movement, the better.”

Despite these setbacks, research continues on other potential COVID-19 therapies, like remdesivir, first formulated to treat Ebola, which was given emergency use authorization by the FDA for those with “severe COVID-19” in May. “We’re targeting a number of different proteins the virus needs for replication,” says Karla Satchell, a microbiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and a lead scientist for a team helping develop drugs to combat COVID-19. “We’re screening all of these drugs for their ability to stop the virus.”

[VIDEO – with Khalilah Gates, MD] A new CDC report finds it takes less than 15 minutes of close contact with people confirmed to have the virus over a 24-hour period to become infected.

Northwestern psychologist Dr. Brian Mustanski has been working with the LGBTQ community for his entire career. Now, he’s leading a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. “We’re now honing in on young gay and bisexual men and transgender women as a particular population to look at rates of infection with COVID,” he said.

“You can imagine that those interfere with an individual’s ability to get back to their life and get back to work,” said Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist and vice chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “The prolonged nature of these symptoms are gonna lead to prolonged determinants in an individual’s quality of life.”

Dr. Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said lifting even more restrictions would be disastrous right now. “Everybody is tired of it,” Murphy said of the pandemic. “And so you have that pressure to just open up, and that’s just going to make everything worse. And from an epidemiological standpoint, I can’t support that. And I can’t recommend that. It’s a big mistake. Every time you do that, you pay with a life. You’re going to kill somebody.”

“[I]t’s a boogeyman abortion opponents have created to frighten voters and derail rational conversation about constitutional rights,” said Katie L. Watson, a professor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Nobody ‘supports’ it, and nobody does it. No patient ever asks a physician to end her pregnancy ‘the moment before birth,’ and no physician would agree to do it.