Multi-country Retrospective Analysis Bacterial Infection and Antimicrobial Resistance in COVID-19 inpatients

Since the first reports of cases from China in late 2019, hundreds of millions of confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 6 million deaths were reported worldwide. COVID-19 causes principally mild flu-like symptoms such as fever, dry cough and sore throat, with favourable outcomes in the vast majority of cases. Nevertheless, for some 5-10% of the patients the disease leads to life threatening complications such as severe pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), sepsis, septic shock and organ failure. Several reports showed that older people (>50 years) are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19. Comorbid conditions and male gender are the other principal risk factors being reported.
The unprecedented pandemic the world is facing is veiling another even greater and silent pandemic, which is prematurely killing hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and is likely complicating the outcome for COVID-19 patients. This silent pandemic is antimicrobial resistance (AMR).