A University of Nebraska Medical Center physician helped develop federal guidelines for treating COVID-19 as part of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expert panel formed last month, the university said in a news release.
Dr. Susan Swindells, an infectious disease physician, was invited to serve on the panel by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and has been a prominent face of the Trump administration's pandemic task force.Â
Swindells serves as a professor of internal medicine at UNMC and founded the college's Specialty Care Clinic.Â
The new guidelines now online were formed in "record time," Swindells said, considering the panel had its first call March 24.Â
Intended for medical providers, the guidelines broadly lay out treatments for two categories: antiviral measures that attack the virus directly and indirect strategies that influence the immune system's response to the virus, the news release said.Â
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Before creation of the guidelines, the virus posed a treatment challenge to doctors and nurses, Swindells said. Â
"There’s a huge amount of information flying around, particularly about how to treat patients who have this coronavirus, and nobody’s quite sure what to do because we don’t have good, quality evidence to base any of our decisions on and we don’t have treatments for this like we do for things like blood pressure, diabetes and infectious diseases such as HIV where you can say well, ‘recommended treatment is X,’" Swindells said.
The National Institutes of Health guidelines are posted and will be updated as new data and research on the virus emerges, the release said.