COVID-19 Topics and More Featured at CHEST 2021

The CHEST 2021 Annual Meeting kicks off Sunday in a virtual environment, having had to make the switch from a hybrid setting due to the continuing pandemic.

Compared with conferences held a year ago at this time, when vaccines were not yet available and the United States had yet to hit the peak of the pandemic, there are now more data to discuss about what we know and do not know about COVID-19, long-term outcomes, vaccines, and other related issues.

More than 2 dozen presentations delve into COVID-19’s impact across health care, including sleep medicine, palliative care, intensive care units, lung cancer, pulmonary disorders, health equity, and more.

The keynote address, called “Perseverance and Motivation: Empathetic Medicine Amidst COVID and Beyond,” will be given by Demondes Haynes, MD, FCCP, the associate dean for admissions for the School of Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where he is a professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine.

Mississippi is the state with the worst outcomes from COVID-19, from number of deaths to a doubling of the stillborn rate since the start of the pandemic. State officials recently pleaded with pregnant women there to get vaccinated, and the governor this week extended the state of emergency.

Other hot topics include issues in critical care, sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome, sleep medicine, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, vaping, and more.

Abstracts linked with the meeting are published in an October 2021 supplement to Chest.