“If you were exposed and the virus is already in your body starting to multiply, if we could get in there early with these drugs that inhibit their multiplication, obviously the virus can’t spread to other parts of your body — thus sparing you developing illness or getting a milder illness,” Schaffner shares. “It also would make you less contagious to others.”
People living with a COVID patient also might be able to get a prescription for one of these antivirals, Schaffner adds.
“It might well be that we could give these drugs to family members who are exposed and never have them develop any infection at all,” Schaffner says.
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Existing treatments are flawed
There are already antiviral treatments available for people in the early throes of COVID, but they each have flaws that limit their usefulness.
Doctors have been using remdesivir — a drug developed to treat Ebola — to curb the damage done by a COVID infection, but its effectiveness is limited, Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security shares.
“What we’ve seen so far, drugs like remdesivir are not really knockout punches because they are kind of repurposed” from the viruses they originally targeted, Adalja says.
Monoclonal antibodies also can attack the virus in early infection, but “as you know they’re in short supply and they’re pretty darned expensive,” Schaffner notes. “They have to be given either intravenously or through a series of multiple injections under the skin, all of which makes things even more expensive, and you have to go to designated locations for treatment.”
“What we’ve always needed is a Tamiflu equivalent to keep people out of the hospital, to decrease complications, but it takes time for antiviral drugs to be made because they’re so specific to the viruses that are causing disease.” Prescribed for flu, Tamiflu (oseltamivir) reduces flu symptoms and shortens recovery time.