The COVID-19 Pandemic and the JAMA Network

Journal editors sit at the crossroads of new ideas and findings, deciding which are worth refining and making public in their journals and which are best saved for another time and place. The global arrival of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought an increase in manuscript submissions describing and evaluating the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and its morbidity and mortality, distilling what seems like years of science and policy into several months. JAMA Network editors were quickly reeducated in principles of epidemiology and public health related to epidemics and pandemics: containment, mitigation, quarantine, case-fatality, transmission coefficients, contact tracing, and whether the then-novel coronavirus was or was not like pandemic influenza. With arrival of the pandemic to the US questions multiplied, about supply chains, rationing, asymptomatic spread, transmission via droplets vs aerosolization, “flattening the curve,” telehealth, markers and duration of immunity, health inequities, and clinical concerns of pathophysiology and prospects for treatment and prevention. Since the publication of JAMA’s first article responding to the emergence of the novel coronavirus in Hubei province, Ch ina, by Fauci and colleagues in January 2020, the JAMA Network journals have received more than 49 000 submissions, a 98% increase over submissions in 2019, and so far have published 777 articles related to COVID-19—...
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research