Media Coverage

Some clinical work has suggested that the G variant’s apparent advantage might hold outside of the Petri dish. A study, posted May 26 to the preprint database medRxiv, also not yet peer-reviewed, led by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine researchers Dr. Egon Ozer, Judd Hultquist found three distinct versions of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in Chicago in mid-March.

“It’s a catastrophe,” said Dr. Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Murphy said officials should “quickly” revive some coronavirus restrictions “before this gets even more out of control, which is certainly the direction that it’s going in.”

“Once somebody develops a treatment for the virus, everything will go away,” said Daniel Batlle, a kidney expert from Northwestern Medicine and professor of medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. Even after a vaccine is developed, treatments that save lives and prevent hospitalization will be crucial. Vaccines might not work for everyone and doses may initially be limited.

“Preserving or improving functional capacity is one of the most important things we do as physicians,” says Dr. Nauman Mushtaq, an Interventional Cardiologist at Northwestern Medical Group. There are many ways to improve mobility metrics, some as simple as increasing activity levels, while others can involve more complex medical procedures.

Dr. Wendy Goodall McDonald, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist at Northwestern Medicine and the medical influencer behind DrEveryWoman.com, said one of the key social determinants of health is health literacy.

“The studies show that even having a health advocate with you when you obtain a surgery or are admitted into the hospital matters. It actually improves health outcomes,” McDonald said. “But if a person can’t even be their own health advocate, they’re really going to have more of a disparity when it comes to getting equal and appropriate care.”

In the COVID-19 intensive care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, every patient was extremely sick, but one woman in her 20s was in a class by herself. The infection, along with the severe inflammation and scarring that so often accompany it, had literally destroyed her lungs. She’d been put on a ventilator almost immediately, but after a few days even that wasn’t enough, and the ventilator was supplemented with an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine, essentially a mechanical lung.

“It’s (at) a level of concern that, if we didn’t change what we’re doing now, that we could be headed toward a Texas or Arizona sort of situation,” Jaline Gerardin, a Northwestern University assistant professor of preventive medicine who works on virus modeling, said in an interview Thursday.

“Football teams, basketball teams, they’re very close to each other,” said Dr. Robert Murphy, the director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “The players are swearing, they’re coughing, they’re shouting, they’re in very close proximity. So the team sports are so far more at risk for spreading this around.”

COVID-19 outbreaks in the south and west have added a layer of anxiety to how to think about the public activities now available to Illinoisans in phase four. Each person must now assess what level of risk they are comfortable with when it comes to activities such as dining out, working out or returning to the office. To help in this process, the Tribune again talked to Dr. Benjamin Singer, assistant professor of medicine (pulmonary and critical care) and biochemistry and molecular genetics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine;

Just prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the kidney pair donation program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital allowed four donors to be matched to four unknown recipients. Watch the eight donors and recipients meets for the first time via video call.