Medicine & Health

Spanish-speaking students and faculty at the School of Medicine have collaborated with community leaders to create and disseminate information in Spanish about the novel coronavirus for the St. Louis region’s Latino population.

An in-home monitoring program for COVID-19 patients who are not sick enough to be hospitalized has been launched by the School of Medicine and BJC HealthCare. By keeping close watch over COVID patients, doctors hope to identify signs of deterioration early so that they can intervene and, ideally, keep more people out of the hospital.

In the COVID-19 wards of Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where Washington University physicians are fighting an exhausting battle against a new, baffling and sometimes lethal disease with the help of the hospital’s nurses, other medical professionals and support staff.

COVID-19 has touched seemingly every aspect of life, and that includes laboratory work on the Medical and Danforth campuses. Most labs have responded by taking steps to temporarily shut down bench work and take that work online, while others have shifted their focus to the coronavirus.

COVID-19 survivors are needed to donate blood plasma. Infectious diseases physicians at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed an expanded access program to give blood plasma from COVID-19 survivors to critically ill patients.

Washington University School of Medicine is launching a clinical trial for patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The study will investigate whether two different antimalarial drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, alone or in combination with a common antibiotic is effective in treating COVID-19 patients.

As the novel coronavirus has accelerated its spread throughout the Midwest and across the U.S., scores of students on the Washington University Medical Campus have mobilized to support health-care workers and the St. Louis community in the fight against the global pandemic.

As the coronavirus continues to spread across the nation, a number of false conclusions and rumors have spread with it. Three epidemiologists in public health at Washington University in St. Louis separate the truth from myth.

Many countries reacted slowly and inadequately to the spread of COVID-19. Some critics have said this is due to initial reports of the disease, which indicated that it mainly affected older populations. “Older adults are not some kind of expendable commodity,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, the Betty Bofinger Brown Distinguished Professor of Social Policy at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and an international leader in gerontology.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and elsewhere are investigating whether transfusions of blood plasma from people who have recovered from COVID-19 can prevent or treat the disease. The approach was used with some success during the 1918 influenza pandemic.