Saeed NK, Al-Khawaja S, Alsalman J, Almusawi S, Albalooshi NA, Al-Biltagi M. Bacterial co-infection in patients with SARS-CoV-2 in the Kingdom of Bahrain. World J Virol 2021; 10(4): 168-181 [PMID: 34367932 DOI: 10.5501/wjv.v10.i4.168]
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05238162
Submitted on:
July 23, 2021, 06:55
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Reader Comments:
Thanks Saeed et al for publishing important research on Co-infections in COVID. However, it would be better if this co-infections could be established as clinical disease/syndrome caused infections rather laboratory identified infections. This is because all these identified organism (both bacteria and fungi) are part of human microbiome/mycobiome or environmental contaminants, unless clinical disease/syndrome we share in the result section, only laboratory identifications will not solve the purpose of scientific evidences. These non-pathogen category of organism identification in laboratory is very vast as expected due to largeness of our microbiome/mycobiome.
I suggest authors to share a table of each identified organism's clinical disease/syndrome then only, we can really say the true nature of organism whether pathogen with COVID or just non-pathogenic association. If this right etiologic diagnosis is not established as co-infections, then it is fruitless to say further the consequences in form of treatments, their outcomes, and overall prognosis.
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Author's Reply:
Replied on July 23, 2021, 08:35
I think the reader did not properly read the paper. The study correlated the laboratory work with the clinical diagnosis and outcome. All patients included in the study were Patients with COVID-19 disease and clinically suspected sepsis, as clearly mentioned in the first paragraph in the methods section. We did not include all patients with COVID-19 disease. As identified in Table 1, we took the cultures from patients with clinically suspected sepsis (not all patients with COVID-19). There was also a clear association of the death rate between the patients who proved to have culture-positive results compared to the culture negative. Table 2 also showed how the death rate raised with the different types of bacterial coinfection being higher, in gram-negative than the gram-positive, higher with the candidal infection and the highest in patients with proven multiple microbial co-infection. Table 4 also showed the difference between the hospital and the community-acquired infection with the different types of the organism.