Is Pneumonia Related to COVID-19 Being Diagnosed and Treated Differently?
Diagnosing pneumonia right now may be more challenging than usual, because of the logistics of taking X-rays in people suspected of having COVID-19, according to Michael Niederman, M.D., clinical director and associate chief of pulmonary and critical care at Weill Cornell Medicine. That’s because imaging equipment used for someone who may have COVID-19 requires extensive disinfecting afterward, and various people and areas of the hospital or health center may be exposed before, during, and afterward. For COVID-19, he says, “The very starting point of doing an X-ray to recognize pneumonia is not as simple as it was.”
Otherwise, a case of COVID-19 pneumonia is generally diagnosed in the same way as other types. Sometimes, chest X-rays can hint at whether a pneumonia is viral or bacterial, but even in cases of a probable viral cause, the image can’t tell doctors which virus is the culprit, Desai says. Testing for flu—and, if that test is negative, then testing for COVID-19—can help pinpoint the cause.
In terms of treatment, even though COVID-19 is a virus, people who develop severe pneumonia are likely to be given antibiotics, just in case of a secondary bacterial infection, according to the experts we spoke with.
So far it’s unclear how often people with COVID-19 develop secondary bacterial pneumonia, says Charles Dela Cruz, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center of Pulmonary Infection Research and Treatment at Yale University. But during the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, secondary bacterial infections were common.
Beyond that, however, another major difference with COVID-19 is that there are no treatments proved to effectively fight the virus. Those hospitalized for COVID-19 will receive supportive care, such as oxygen. Some people have also received antiviral drugs, but none have yet been shown to be effective against the virus in clinical trials.