Treatments

A: New discoveries happen every day! In addition to research taking place to develop a vaccine, many clinicians and researchers are learning more about how to treat Covid-19 infection. The new knowledge about treatment falls into three categories: 1) pathophysiology of Covid-19 infection, 2) decreasing disease severity, and 3) minimizing long-term complications. Understanding the physiologic Read more…

A: What a confusing jumble! We Nerdy Girls like to keep the following phrase in mind: TREATMENT TIMING MATTERS. Different treatments target different points in the disease course, as helpfully demonstrated in these figures. Punchline: We’ll need an entire bag of treatment tricks to beat this devilishly nasty disease. A little more context: First we Read more…

BREAKING NEWS: A well-designed study by a respectable research group has yielded preliminary results indicating that a common, inexpensive steroid reduced deaths among very ill patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Nerdy Girl initial reactions: (1) THE STUDY IS WELL-DESIGNED Using the 3 Cs Framework: COMPARISON, CHANCE, and CONTEXT a) There is a randomly assigned COMPARISON group Read more…

A: The Nerdy Girls want nothing more to wake up one day to this type of COVID-19 “game-changer” news. Maybe this was all a bad dream! For now, we lean towards consuming this stream of press with both cautious optimism AND skepticism. The news story in question from Friday came from a press release by Read more…

A. Convalescent plasma is a treatment that’s more than a century old and has been previously used as treatment for other infectious diseases, including the 1918 Pandemic Flu, MERS, and the 2003 outbreak of SARS. It involves taking antibody-rich blood plasma from recovered, healthy donors, and transfusing it into patients with severe disease as a Read more…

A (short): “Remdesivir isn’t a home run but looks active and can be part of a toolbox of drugs and diagnostics that substantially lower our risk heading into the fall,” says former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb. A (long): The stock market and news media are brimming with optimism around the release of clinical trial data Read more…

A: Promising preliminary results from an uncontrolled study, but more evidence needed. News broke late this week about results from a study at the University of Chicago of 125 COVID-19 patients, 113 of whom were severe cases. The patients in the trial were given a daily intravenous infusion of remdesivir, an antiviral medication produced by Read more…

A: Proning refers to putting patients on their stomachs rather than their backs. It helps with getting oxygen to the patients’ lungs. Link to CNN Article on Proning Link to original FB post

Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are medications used to treat a few autoimmune diseases such as lupus. They are also anti malarial drugs. Although many people have been excited about the potential for them to treat COVID-19, there isn’t strong data to support this possibility. Unfortunately, there have been cases of “medication hoarding” of these drugs—which puts Read more…

Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s 3/25 podcast provides a great explainer. TL;DR: “Our best protection for now: social distancing, washing our hands, looking out for ourselves and our loved ones, trying to help out wherever we can, and behaving like we might have the virus.” Transcript here Link to original FB post

A: No. Clinical trials have recently launched for a series of investigational treatments. Who to trust when conflicting reports come out? The FDA. See link here. Link to original FB page

ETA 03/20: Note — science is moving fast on this — see more recent post above as new info made available. Alison Buttenheim Should I take ibuprofen for COVID-19 symptoms? The WHO is now recommending to avoid ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, Nurofen) and other NSAIDS like naproxen (Aleve) for COVID-19 symptoms and instead use Tylenol/acetaminophen/paracetamol for Read more…