10 Mar What Did We Learn From the Earliest COVID Trials?

By Kristina Fiore, Medpage Today

It’s easy to forget how helpless clinicians around the world felt 5 years ago, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

They were either bracing for or treating a flood of new patients coming to the hospital — and they had not a single clinical trial to guide treatment decisions.

There was, of course, no shortage of opinions on what to do, said Roy Gulick, MD, MPH, an infectious diseases physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, who was on the frontlines of the outbreak at the time.

“We turned to drugs that we already had, that seemed to have a rationale that they could perhaps help,” Gulick told MedPage Today. Those included hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and the HIV protease inhibitor lopinavir/ritonavir (Kaletra). Read more…