Your October 8, 2020 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine must have been lost in the mail. Otherwise, you would have read thar Researchers completed the trial, known as the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT-1). The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Scientists randomly assigned 1,062 hospitalized COVID-19 patients to receive remdesivir or a placebo plus standard treatment. The patients received an intravenous infusion of remdesivir or placebo for up to 10 days.
The final results showed that the antiviral treatment was beneficial, consistent with the preliminary findings. Patients who received remdesivir were quicker to recover, which was defined as being medically stable enough to be discharged from the hospital. The median recovery time was 10 days with remdesivir compared to 15 days for the placebo group. Patients given remdesivir were more likely to have improved by day 15.
Remdesivir also improved mortality rates for those receiving supplemental oxygen (4% with remdesivir versus 13% with placebo at day 29 of treatment). All-cause mortality among all patients was 11% with remdesivir and 15% with placebo at day 29.
Son of a gun. Patients with COVID, a virus, were treated by a well-known and widely used anti-viral drug and got better.