And there is no evidence for the theorized cytokine storm
Originally posted on Quora May 24, 2023
Such are the findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, of a research team hailing from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who used a new machine learning technique called CarpeDiem to discover how bacterial pneumonia infections in 585 ventilator patients, 190 of whom had COVID, effected the course of their primary infection/disease over a four year period from June 2018 to March 2022. The team found that the mortality rate attributed to the virus alone was relatively low compared to the secondary infections that occurred during patients ICU stay such as VAP (Ventilator Associated Pneumonia). For instance, the researchers found that 57.4% of patients admitted with COVID developed at least 1 episode of VAP compared to only 25% of patients admitted without COVID and that 19.5% of COVID patients developed multiple episodes of VAP compared with only 3.5% of patients without COVID. Furthermore, the mortality rate of ventilator patients was not significantly different between patients who experienced one episode compared to patients who experience multiple episodes but those who were successfully treated did compared to those who were not: 76.5% of patients who were not cured of their secondary infection died compared to 17.6% who were cured. As one of the co-authors of the study noted, unsuccessful treatment of these bacterial pneumonia infections was severely underestimated and may have contributed more to the deaths among ventilator patients than the virus itself.
The importance of VAP as a driver of mortality in patients with COVID-19 has been underestimated, likely because bronchoscopic sampling has been uncommon during the pandemic, use of antibiotics is ubiquitous, and clinical criteria and biomarkers do not accurately distinguish between primary SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia and secondary bacterial pneumonia.