For infectious diseases doctor Siham Mahgoub, some diligent “detective work” and plenty of curiosity are what many medical breakthroughs in challenging patient cases are made of. Now that she is on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mahgoub admits that the stakes are higher and the learning curve is steep, but her approach remains the same.
These days, Mahgoub, an assistant professor in the Howard University College of Medicine and a consultant in the Infectious Disease Division of the Howard University Hospital (HUH), Department of Medicine, and her colleagues on the hospital’s medical team have found themselves in an unfamilar place — “learning as they go, about how to triage and treat” the growing number of patients at the inner-city hospital in Northwest D.C. with symptoms caused by a novel virus for which there is no vaccine or cure.
