UK: Covid cure in days not a part of our official drug trials

What does UK say about miraculous drug

Monday, 20th April 2020

Some US studies show that really sick patients come off ventilators within a day by using remdesivir drug. Over 100 patients were given the drug at 15 VHS centers, said Gilead Sciences. That wasn’t a part of UK’s tests at the University of Oxford, said Professor Peter Horby. He said on BBC Radio, “So that drug is in a number of trials. There is a trial that's just finished in China and I think we will see the results of that fairly soon and it's also in trials in the UK led by the drug company and it's on trials in the US. But it's not currently in our trial. I think we've got to be cautious. But yes, it is a drug that in the laboratory looks like it's got good activity. So we would just hope it has the same activity in people and patients”.

114,217 people in UK have been infected with death toll over 15,000. 888 of them have died in one day yesterday.

When the patients were given the drug used to treat Ebola, the symptoms had lessened over a week with only two deaths in the US.

“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We've only had two patients perish”, said Dr Kathleen Mullane, infectious disease expert leading the trial at The University of Chicago Medicine. She added, “Most of our patients are severe and most of them are leaving at six days, so that tells us duration of therapy doesn’t have to be 10 days. We have very few that went out to 10 days, maybe three”.  However, this drug wasn’t ready to be labeled as a cure yet.

They cautioned, “Partial data from an ongoing clinical trial is by definition incomplete and should never be used to draw conclusions”.

Out of 152 trial sites across the globe, this is just one of them. The drug was not found so effective to cure Ebola. Nonetheless, after conducting tests on animals, it was found that it could both prevent and treat coronavirus, SARS and MERS.

WHO had claimed that this medicine might work against Covid-19. Trump had stated that it “seems to have a very good result”.

The world’s largest clinical trial for treating Covid-19 infection has been launched by NHS, but more number of patients should be willing to take part with almost about 1,000 volunteers already. More and more adults with the disease are being encouraged to take part. The interested participants are being assigned to standard care or standard care plus one of the three existing drugs in a random fashion. They are Lopinavir-Ritonavir (used for HIV), Dexamethasone (used for inflammation) and Hydroxychloriquine (used for Malaria). They might be effective in fighting Covid-19.

This gives the world a hope to tackle corona virus.

Source: The Sun