Antibiotics for community-acquired pneumonia in adults

To the Editor:
Postma et al. report that beta-lactam monotherapy was noninferior to therapy with beta-lactam–macrolide or fluoroquinolone. Table S3 in the Supplementary Appendix shows that 38.7% of the patients receiving beta-lactam monotherapy also received atypical coverage during hospitalization. However, atypical pathogens were found in only 2.1% of these patients, and there was suspicion of an atypical pathogen in just 8.1% of these patients. It would be interesting to see whether the primary outcome would have been similar in the 61.3% of the patients receiving beta-lactam monotherapy who did not receive atypical coverage as compared with the other two treatment groups. [...]