Without a group of individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 who didn’t get Remdesivir (a control group) to compare with, it becomes difficult to determine if the drug actually has any benefit. This is particularly true for a disease, like COVID-19, where the majority of subjects are likely to recover without any drug.
To make that case, one physician from a different hospital researching Remdesivir noted that she had seen some remarkable recoveries with Remdesivir , but had equally seen remarkable recoveries without Remdesivir! So where does that leave us? Even if the drug may be effective, there still remain questions like, what dose of drug? For how long? When is the best time to start treatment? Which patients could the drug potentially harm? Certain types of clinical evaluations could help us determine the potential effectiveness, for example, testing the blood to see if the drug actually reduced the amount of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. This was not done for the first study (not sure about the second one). The bottom line is we need well-designed clinical studies to figure out if any of the drugs of interest are truly effective, and we need solid answers NOW!
Emphasizing the importance of having a control group, a study was just completed (reported 4/21/20) among COVID-19 patients treated at Veteran’s Administration hospitals. Comparing outcomes between patients getting standard care or receiving the drug hydroxychloroquine, showed more than twice as many deaths among those getting hydroxychloroquine (see my article posted on April 15 on Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine). A similar study of patients in France also showed no benefit of hydroxychloroquine over those who didn’t receive it. There are still many trials on going with better study designs to tell us if there is a benefit. Stay tuned!