COVID-19: An Update

James D. Chalmers is Asthma and Lung UK Chair of Respiratory Research at the University of Dundee (Dundee, UK) and a Consultant Respiratory Physician at Ninewells Hospital (Dundee). His research and clinical interests lie in difficult respiratory infections, particularly bronchiectasis and pneumonia, and include COVID-19.

James is Chief Editor of the European Respiratory Journal and is Chair of the Science and Research Committee of the British Thoracic Society (BTS). He leads the Respiratory Research Group at the University of Dundee and has published >400 peer reviewed articles in the area of respiratory infections.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, James was Chair of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Task Force for COVID-19, which produced the ERS living guidelines for the management of hospitalised patients with the virus. He was also a member of the NICE Long Covid Guideline committee and was chief investigator of a number of observational and intervention studies focused on novel therapeutics for COVID-19. He is part of the management board of PHOSP-COVID, the UK national observational study into the long-term effects of COVID-19.

Catia Cilloniz is Associate Professor at the School of Medicine of the University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), Coordinator of the Pneumonia Research Group of Applied Research in Infectious Respiratory Diseases and Critically Ill Patients Group of IDIBAPS at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona (Barcelona), and Coordinator of the Worldwide Pneumonia Awareness Campaign: Pneumolight.

Catia received the Extraordinary Doctoral Award from the University of Barcelona and the Mentor award from the Spanish Society of Pneumology. In 2019, she became a Fellow of the European Respiratory Society (ERS).

Catia has authored 210 scientific publications, 10 book chapters and one book. Her major achievements can be summarised as follows: she has studied the immunological profile of pneumonia patients; she has described the microbiological features of pneumonia in different settings and the risk factors associated with antibiotic-resistant pathogens; she has demonstrated that HIV patients with Legionella pneumonia should be managed in the same way as people without HIV and that virologically suppressed HIV patients with pneumococcal pneumonia should be managed in the same way as the general population; and she has investigated pneumonia and sepsis in very old patients.

Bin Cao is Director of the Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, China-Japan Friendship Hospital (Beijing, China), and a professor at Peking Union Medical College, Capital Medical University, and Tsinghua University-Peking University Joint Center for Life Sciences (all Beijing). He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, co-founder of CAP-China (https://www.chinapneumonia.cn/) and President-Elect of Chinese Thoracic Society (CTS). A physician-scientist, Bin is a leader in the field of respiratory medicine and a tireless researcher of evidence-based medicine for respiratory infections.

He pioneered “respiratory viral sepsis”, which extended the theory of sepsis and initiated the “seven-category ordinal scale” in clinical trials, which provided the feasibility to conduct randomised controlled clinical trials during the pandemic. His research has an outstanding influence in China and has provided a source for the treatment guidelines of respiratory diseases of the WHO and around the world.

Bin has published over 200 original peer reviewed articles and reviews in major journals, including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, among which 14 papers are listed as a Highly Cited Paper in the Essential Science Indicators (ESI), have an H-index of 68, and have >130 000 citations. He was also elected as “Highly Cited Chinese Researcher” by Elsevier for 5 consecutive years.