THE CONVERSATION: Coronavirus: what if the drugs don’t work?

Description

There is no known treatment for COVID-19 and early clinical trial results of repurposed drugs have so far been disappointing.

A trial for hydroxychloroquine – a drug that the US president, Donald Trump, described as a “game changer” – was recently paused by the World Health Organization (WHO) for reasons of safety. And while the antiviral drug remdesivir has been approved for emergency use in some countries, its results are modest, reducing the period of sickness by around 30% but having no proven effect on preventing death. And a just-published clinical trial of blood plasma used to treat patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19 found that it did not help patients get better any quicker compared with standard therapy.