The toll of drug-resistant “superbug” infections worsened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. health officials said.
FILE This Oct. 12, 2009 photo shows a petri dish with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus cultures at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn, England. The U.S. toll of drug-resistant superbug infections worsened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, health officials said Tuesday, July 12, 2022.
CDC officials think several factors may have caused the rise, including how COVID-19 was treated when it first hit the U.S. in early 2020. The CDC doesn't have 2020 data on all superbugs, partly because health officials had to focus on COVID-19. But it does have data from seven kinds of bacterial and fungal infections that were detected in hospital patients, including MRSA and a bug called CRE that's known as “the nightmare bacteria."One possible reason: From March to October 2020, almost 80% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 received an antibiotic, CDC officials said.