Clinical

The end of February brings us one step closer to the close of flu season, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to get a break from mass numbers of patients presenting to emergency rooms and urgent care with signs of viral infection. This time it’s norovirus, however. According to an article published by Becker’s Hospital Review, there have been 25 outbreaks this year, compared with just 14 during the same period a year ago. In …

With healthcare and mainstream media devoting so much energy to raising awareness of long COVID, it could be easy to write off some of the telltale signs—cognitive difficulties, headaches, pain, dizziness, fatigue, and others—as exactly that and look no further into alternative diagnoses. That could be a costly mistake for a patient’s wellbeing, though, as a new article published by the European Journal of Neurology reveals that some patients with those characteristic symptoms could actually …

While the national rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths remain well below the levels we experienced at the height of the pandemic, data tracked by The New York Times indicate that the coming weeks could bring an uptick in new cases nationally. The latest report shows that several states are already seeing an upswing in confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Cases in Idaho soared 106% over the past 2 weeks, though deaths were down …

By most accounts—and lots of data—infection rates, hospitalizations, and deaths related to SARS-CoV-2 have declined sufficiently to consider the pandemic over. Zoom in on that big picture, however, and you may find that the older segment of the U.S. population is still struggling with the virus on a grand scale. According to an article published by The New York Times, approximately 90% of January 2023 COVID-related deaths in the United States occurred among patients between …

Counseling is more important than routine screening of patients perceived to be at high risk for genital herpes, at least in the absence of symptoms, according to an updated guidance from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. One caveat is that patients known to have genital herpes but who are between outbreaks are not considered to be asymptomatic. The recommendation also does not apply to patients …

The potentially lifesaving necessity of maintaining proper hand hygiene was drilled into us ad nauseum over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like all good things, however, overdoing it carries its own hazards. According to new guidance published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, excessive handwashing and even the length of a worker’s fingernails can increase risk for infection in that individual and those they come in contact with. Providers and other patient-facing team members, …

There’s a movement afoot in urgent care for providers to practice to the upper limits of their clinical expertise—in other words, to not “degrade” the acuity of care by referring or transferring patients out of convenience or expediency when they really could be treated in the urgent care setting. Even the often-ominous chest pain should be considered a “maybe” rather than an automatic referral, based on the findings of a study conducted in Australia and …

While new cases of COVID-19 continue to occur in every part of the United States, infection and mortality rates have fallen far enough for the pandemic to be considered “over” by most public health standards. That doesn’t mean patients and providers should view SARS-CoV-2 as a minor inconvenience, however. According to an article published online by Patient Care, some 36 million Americans have or have had long COVID (for purposes of that article, anyone who …

One of the key messages during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was that an individual’s level of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 had a strong influence on their risk for infection. And while that’s undoubtedly true to some extent—how can you contract a disease you’re not exposed to?—new data suggest that’s an overly simplistic notion.  A study published by JAMA Internal Medicine reveals that one of the most-exposed groups in the United States also experienced lower …

The U.S. healthcare system has been criticized for being a bit too willing to prescribe antibiotics, often for patients who are suffering through viral, not bacterial, infections, thereby fueling increases in antimicrobial resistance. To its credit, the urgent care industry has rallied together to make antibiotic stewardship a priority. That commitment needs to be continued and amplified to fight what the World Health Organization calls “high levels” of antimicrobial resistance around the globe, however, as …