What do scientists wish they knew about the coronavirus? Which treatments actually work, what antibodies are good for, and which public health measures help.
With some states getting ready to lift their stay-at-home orders and relax their social distancing measures, it may seem that health officials have the coronavirus outbreak under control.
Which treatments actually work?Doctors have tried a variety of drugs, including medicines developed to treat malaria, autoimmune diseases and Ebola. Despite high hopes for some of them, so far none has been proven to be a silver bullet. Story continuesThe NIH also discouraged the use of other classes of drugs, including interferons, Janus kinase inhibitors, ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers . Systemic corticosteroids should be avoided for most hospitalized patients who are not critically ill, according to the new guidelines, which will be updated as more data become available.
Sorting through the mass of information being produced on these treatments, and determining which results are reliable, will be a big challenge moving forward, researchers said. The problem is that not all antibodies are neutralizing antibodies that attach to the surface of a viral particle and prevent it from attacking the body’s cells, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco. On top of that, scientists aren’t completely sure which antibodies are connected to a protective immune response for this particular virus.
Who is immune, and for how long?We don’t just need to know which antibodies confer immunity, said Yonatan Grad, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard University. Scientists also need to figure out which COVID-19 survivors have high levels of immunity and how long that protection lasts.
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