At the end of March, I wrote about a preliminary study conducted by Stanford emergency physician Ian Brown, MD, that indicated that a significant number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 are also simultaneously co-infected with other respiratory viruses, including influenza or rhinovirus. "Currently, if a patient tests positive for a different respiratory virus, we believe that they don't have COVID-19," said Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, associate professor of medicine and of biomedical data science at the medical school. "However, given the co-infection rates we've observed in this sample, that is an incorrect assumption."Now Stanford emergency department physician James Quinn, MD, and resident David Kim, MD, PhD, together with clinical virologist Benjamin Pinsky, MD, PhD, have extended this analysis to include more than 1,200 samples, collected from people from multiple sites in Northern California who were experiencing a cough, fever or other symptoms of a respiratory infection. They...
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