Maybe you’ve heard that the pandemic is over in the United States. (It’s not.) Masks are no longer required in most places and large gatherings are becoming commonplace again. Most of the country is in the green, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracking site, which monitors COVID-19 transmission and hospitalization rates. Many people have been relying on vaccines to control outbreaks, and there is renewed attention on getting newly available treatments for sick people.
But coronavirus cases are on the rise again with more than a quarter of counties reporting high levels of transmission. And those are official numbers. No one really knows how many at-home tests come back positive and are never reported. Those cases are driving hospitalization rates up, with pockets of yellow and orange popping up on the CDC’s map, indicating that hospitals are entering the danger zone of being overwhelmed. Deaths have remained fairly low. That could change if another wave of infection sweeps the country.
The test-to-treat initiative
About 20,000 pharmacies, hospitals, urgent care centers and other places have the antiviral pill Paxlovid (a combination of two medications), made by Pfizer. The federal government plans to extend that number to40,000 in the coming weeks, Ashish Jha, the White House COVID Response director, said on April 26 during a news briefing. Many of those sites also have molnupiravir antiviral pills, made by Merck. The expansion is part of the federal government’s test-to-treat initiative to make testing and treatment widely available.
In much more limited supply are intravenous doses of monoclonal antibodies and the antiviral drug remdesivir the only antiviral drug fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating COVID-19
Drawbacks to these drugs
There are other wrinkles besides access to using the drugs. For all of the therapeutics, they have been studied primarily in unvaccinated people who are at risk of going on to develop severe disease, says Gallagher. So we basically end up projecting that data onto the population we have now, which is largely vaccinated.” It’s not clear that every person who has health conditions that put them at risk needs the drugs, especially if they have gotten a vaccine booster shot. The drugs might decrease symptoms, but there’s no real evidence to show they’re effective in making people feel better faster, he says.
The drugs are good at keeping people out of the hospital, though. Paxlovid reduced the relative risk of hospitalization and death by about 89 percent researchers reported in the April 14 New England Journal of Medicine. Its side effects included a distorted sense of taste, and a small number of people developed diarrhea.
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