UNMC Doctor on National COVID-19 Panel
By Mike Tobias 
, Senior Producer, Nebraska Public Media
April 22, 2020, 11:28 a.m. ·
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A UNMC physician is part of a national group of experts developing treatment guidelines for COVID-19.
Dr. Susan Swindells was one of 30 physicians, statisticians and other experts invited to join the U.S. National Institutes of Health panel.
Dr. Susan Swindells (Courtesy photo)
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"Expert U.S. panel develops NIH treatment guidelines for COVID-19" - NIH article
“We’ve been asked to develop federal treatment guidelines to help doctors and nurses on the front lines know how to treat patients with coronavirus," said Swindells, a professor and infectious disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Nebraska Medicine.
“There’s a huge amount of information flying around, particularly about how to treat patients who have this coronavirus," Swindells added, in an interview provided by UNMC. "Nobody’s quite sure what to do because we don’t have good quality evidence to base any of our decisions on and we don’t have treatments for this like we do for things like blood pressure, diabetes, and infectious diseases such as HIV where you can say well, ‘recommended treatment is X.’ We don’t have any of that. So Dr. Tony Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, decided we should come up with some federal guidelines to help practicing clinicians on the front line.”
The published guidelines will be updated often, and Swindells said she will serve as long as needed on the panel, which was first called together in late March and drawn from U.S. health care and academic organizations, federal agencies and professional societies