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How is coronavirus treated?

To date, there is no proven cure for COVID-19. The body of the diseased itself defeats (or does not defeat) the virus with the help of immunity.

In some cases, the disease is more severe, pneumonia develops, and then patients need supportive and symptomatic therapy: intravenous fluids to prevent dehydration and additional oxygen if the lungs function worse. In the most severe cases, patients require mechanical ventilation apparatus (IVL) or even extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). The number of ventilators and ECMO is very limited, and severe patients with coronavirus spend several weeks in intensive care . Therefore, there is a great danger that places in intensive care will quickly end, as has already happened in Italy.

Obviously, the question is, what else can help the body fight the virus?


Unfortunately, there is no good answer to this question yet.

An ideal medicine against COVID-19 should help patients with weakened immune status survive, speed up the recovery of others, and reduce the number of cases of pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome, which, in fact, cause such a high mortality rate from the virus.

To date (March 20, 2020), none of the drugs has proven effectiveness, but many clinical trials are being conducted. The list of drugs and approaches being tested is maintained, for example, by the MedScape site .

As always with outbreaks of new diseases, searches are primarily carried out among existing drugs: the process of checking the safety of a new medicine can take years, and you need to act quickly. Registered drugs have already passed clinical trials, they have known side effects, they are approved for use in humans. Searches are conducted among several groups of drugs: antiviral; anti-inflammatory drugs (drugs that reduce the likelihood of developing a life-threatening inflammatory response to the infection; mitigate the course of pneumonia. And of course, everything is checked that somehow helped with the SARS epidemic, which belongs to the same group of coronaviruses as the current COVID-19 .

Among the promising candidates


Chloroquine , a remedy for malaria, which is also used in the treatment of certain autoimmune diseases and has an antiviral effect . This drug really stopped the multiplication of many viruses in vitro (in cell culture), but did not affect the development of infection during infection of animals . The recently published results of the use of chloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19 are cautiously optimistic. However, it is still difficult to assess the effectiveness of the drug, because studies in China were carried out in ten different hospitals, which inevitably entails protocol inconsistency and not very reliable data. A small but successful open clinical trial in France is also reported.. A number of clinical trials of the drug have been registered in China now, but they have not yet been completed and are not open to the medical community.

Favipiravir (brand name Avigan) , registered by Fujifilm for the treatment of influenza in 2014, performed well against COVID-19. Initial tests on 200 patients in hospitals in Wuhan and Shenzhen showed a faster recovery and a decrease in the need for respiratory support (including the same ventilators) when using Avigan. Although Chinese researchers have reported the safety and tolerability of the drug, after being registered in Japan, it was left as a reserve drug for severe influenza epidemics. It was reported that it causes violationsthe formation of the fetus and can penetrate the semen .

The high-profile news about the new anti-COVID-19 antibody that we already published on the channel is likely to be more important for a quick diagnosis of the virus than for treatment. Although a hypothetically specific antibody can bind viral particles and thus prevent infection, in practice such therapy is effective for a very small number of viral infections.

Also in development is the therapy with plasma preparations of ill patients . The principle of such therapy is literally in “ transplantation of someone else’s immunity”: The body of a sick person, a donor, learned how to produce antibodies against the virus. When introduced to their recipient, they can fight the virus in the patient’s blood. Such therapy can be effective and used to immediately inactivate the virus in the blood . However, only once - with repeated use, rejection of foreign antibodies occurs.

Total


There is no medicine for COVID-19 yet.

In practice, this means that you can only try not to get infected and rely on your own immunity, which can weaken from malnutrition, lack of sleep, some diseases of the immune system, and old age. No medication is able to "stimulate the immune system as a whole to less sick" does not exist . But an active lifestyle, a full diverse diet and sleep for at least eight hours really strengthen the immune system and health. Against coronavirus, this is not a fact that will help, but the quality of life will definitely improve !

The material was prepared jointly with Inna Zucher, a molecular biologist from Oxford for the channel “ Rationally on Coronavirus ”

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