Coronavirus patients taken off ventilators after getting experimental HIV drug

[redleghunter]

Two coronavirus patients in New York City are off ventilators and out of intensive care after they received an experimental drug to treat HIV and breast cancer.

As the skyrocketing number of cases stretches city hospitals to the limit, doctors are racing to find out which drugs on the market or in development might help in fighting the infection.

The drug, leronlimab, is delivered by injection twice in the abdomen, the Daily Mail reported.

Of seven critically ill patients who received the drug in New York, two were removed from ventilators and two showed significant improvement.


Coronavirus patients taken off ventilators after getting experimental HIV drug

 

[David Kent]

People are taken off the ventilators when they recover enough anyway. Saw one lade on the news who was taken of the ventilator after improving but was still very ill.

 

[com7fy8]

Well, they need to be able to tell if the improvement was due to the drug, or if the person would recover anyway. But it could be the drug assisted recovery, and certain ones would either have died, without it, or they would have taken longer to recover and could have had leftover lung damage which could have been prevented by the medicine.

I guess they can see how many die in spite of the drug . . . if they do.

Ones seem to be concentrating on anti-viral drugs.

I am curious how much work is being done to produce medicine that offsets the effect of the virus on the lungs. I mean drugs which act on the lungs, not on the virus.

There is reporting, too, that they are harvesting plasma from ones who have recovered from COVID-19, and that plasma has antibodies which can fight the virus; so they infuse that plasma into someone with active COVID-19. And ones say this seems to have helped.