A study authored by Dr. Robert Gottlieb of Baylor Scott & White Research Institute is showing the power of the anti-viral treatment Remdesivir. The study compared the efficacy of the drug versus standard-of-care treatment in adults with severe COVID-19.
Not every hospital has access to the drug, so Gottlieb wanted to explore the importance of the medicine. “We took a constellation of hospitals that approximated the quality of those that participated in the trial and examined the outcomes of a group of comparable patients during the same time. What we found was that patients in the hospitals with Remdesivir on Remdesivir had an improved chance of survival compared to the patients without it.”
The study, called “Remdesivir for severe COVID-19 versus a cohort receiving standard of care,” evaluated patients who had been hospitalized and had oxygen saturation of 94 percent or lower. They were followed for 14 days. On day 14, 74.4 percent of patients treated with Remdesivir had recovered compared to 59 percent of those who were not given the drug. At day 14, 7.6 percent of the patients in the Remdesivir cohort had died, while 12.5 percent in the other group had died.
After 14 days, the group that received Remdesivir had a 62 percent of increased chance survival compared to the standard of care group. “We’ve shown safety and efficacy and that a dose of 5 days is as good as 10 days for non-ventilated patients. And now with this latest data, there is a very strong suggestion for survival benefit,” Gottlieb writes.
“It’s a tremendous feeling of hope. Because now we know that we have therapies that we can offer that can help our patients. We know that there are therapies that can help our friends or family. We know that there are therapies that would help ourselves if, God forbid, that we got sick. You have nurses on the front lines that are even higher risk than physicians. If God forbid, they get sick we have something we can do to help them mitigate their risk.”
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