Prolonged critical avalanche burial for nearly 23 h with severe hypothermia and severe frostbite with good recovery: a case report.

Background: Accidental hypothermia with severe frostbite is a rare combination of injuries with a high risk for long-term sequelae. There are widely accepted recommendations for the management of avalanche victims and for frostbite treatment, but no recommendation exists for the treatment of frostbite in severe hypothermic patients, specifically for the management of hypothermic avalanche victims presenting with frostbite.

Case Presentation: We present a case of a previously healthy, 53-year-old male skier who was critically buried by an avalanche at 2300 m of altitude at an ambient temperature of - 8 °C for nearly 23 h.

Critically buried avalanche victims can develop severe hypothermia in less than 60 min.

Background: A major challenge in the management of avalanche victims in cardiac arrest is differentiating hypothermic from non-hypothermic cardiac arrest, as management and prognosis differ. Duration of burial with a cutoff of 60 min is currently recommended by the resuscitation guidelines as a parameter to aid in this differentiation However, the fastest cooling rate under the snow reported so far is 9.4 °C per hour, suggesting that it would take 45 min to cool below 30 °C, which is the temperature threshold below which a hypothermic cardiac arrest can occur.

Diagnostic performance of the Elecsys SARS-CoV-2 antigen assay in the clinical routine of a tertiary care hospital: Preliminary results from a single-center evaluation.

Background: This report describes a manufacturer-independent evaluation of the diagnostic accuracy of the Elecsys SARS-CoV-2 antigen assay from Roche Diagnostics in a tertiary care setting.

Methods: In this single-center study, we used nasopharyngeal swabs from 403 cases from the emergency department and intensive care unit of our hospital. The reference standard for detecting SARS-CoV-2 was the reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay.