MONDAY, March 7, 2022 (HealthDay News) — People who were born with a heart defect have a nearly doubled risk for severe COVID-19 illness or death and need to get vaccinated, wear masks and take other steps to protect themselves, researchers report.
Those patients at the highest risk for severe COVID-19 were 50 and older, men, and those with other health conditions such as heart failure, pulmonary hypertension, Down syndrome, diabetes or obesity, according to the study.
“People with heart defects should be encouraged to receive the COVID-19 vaccines and boosters and to continue to practice additional preventive measures for COVID-19, such as mask-wearing and physical distancing,” said study author Karrie Downing. She’s an epidemiologist at the U.S. National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and the COVID-19 Response Team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“People with heart defects should also consult with their health care teams about additional steps to manage personal risks related to COVID-19, given the significantly increased risk of severe infection and serious complications,” Downing added.
The study analyzed data on more than 235,600 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the United States collected from March 2020 to January 2021. Of those patients, 0.2% had a congenital heart defect.
While 68% of the COVID-19 patients with a heart defect also had at least one other health condition, the rate was 59% among those without a congenital heart defect.
The study found that 54% of those with congenital heart defects and 43% of those without a defect were admitted to intensive care; 24% of those with congenital heart defects and 15% of those without a defect required a ventilator to breathe, and 11% of those with congenital heart defects and 7% of those without a defect died during hospitalization.
Patients with congenital heart defects remained at high risk for severe COVID-19 even when they were divided into categories by age or other health conditions.
The findings were published March 7 in the journal Circulation.
“More work is needed to identify why the clinical course of COVID-19 disease results in significantly worse outcomes for some hospitalized patients with risk factors for critical COVID-19 illness, like heart defects, and not for others,” Downing said in a journal news release.
There are more than a dozen types of congenital heart defects, which are the most common birth defects worldwide with a prevalence of 157 per 100,000 in 2017, according to the American Heart Association.
More information
There’s more on congenital heart defects at the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
SOURCE: Circulation, news release, March 7, 2022
WEDNESDAY, March 9, 2022 (HealthDay News) — In a cohort of K-12 schools, secondary transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 was low and was reduced by universal masking, according to a study published online March 9 in Pediatrics.
Angelique E. Boutzoukas, M.D., from the Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues examined the impact of various masking practices on secondary transmission in a cohort of K-12 schools in an open cohort study conducted from July 26 to Dec. 13, 2021. Mitigation practices and weekly infection data were reported by districts. Across nine states, 1,112,899 students and 157,069 staff attended in-person school in 61 districts.
The researchers found that 40,601 primary and 3,085 secondary infections were reported by the districts. Overall, six, nine, and 46 districts had optional masking policies, partial masking policies, and universal masking, respectively. Compared with universally masked districts, those that were optionally masked throughout the study period had 3.6 times the rate of secondary transmission. Universally masked districts had 7.3 predicted secondary infections for every 100 community-acquired cases compared with 26.4 for optionally masked districts.
“Consistent with earlier data, secondary transmission across the entire study cohort was low, with more than 90 percent of cases identified in school members originating from the community,” the authors write. “Among districts with universal masking policies, secondary transmission was reduced by 72 percent compared with districts having optional masking policies.”
Several authors disclosed financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
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