DEXAMETHASONE? First drug shown to reduce Covid-19 deaths.

 (Editors note: The Chinese used Potassium ions.)

The steroid dexamethasone is the first drug shown to reduce COVID-19 deaths.

Dexamethasone, a steroid in use for decades, reduced deaths of COVID-19 patients on ventilators by about a third compared with standard care, researchers reported in a news release June 16. Deaths of COVID-19 patients on supplemental oxygen were reduced by about 20 percent.

If the results hold up to scrutiny once scientists have a chance to review the full data, the drug would be the first to reduce the risk of death from the disease, Tina Hesman Saey reports.

Although the results are important for treating the sickest patients with COVID-19, those patients represent only about 5 percent of people diagnosed with the coronavirus, says Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious diseases doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It’s not steroids for all.”  Read more
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MAY 18, 2020

Investigational vaccine protects monkeys against COVID-19 pneumonia

by National Institutes of Health

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A single dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, an investigational vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, has protected six rhesus macaques from pneumonia caused by the virus, according to National Institutes of Health scientists and University of Oxford collaborators. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19. The researchers posted their data to the preprint server bioRxiv. The findings are not yet peer-reviewed but are being shared to assist the public health response to COVID-19. Based on these data, a Phase 1 trial of the candidate vaccine began on April 23 in healthy volunteers in the United Kingdom.