If You Get Covid-19, Here Are the Current Treatments Available

Outcomes are improving, but many people don’t get the therapies they need

Robert Roy Britt
Elemental
Published in
7 min readFeb 8, 2021

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Image: sirawit99/Getty Images

Scientists and doctors have made significant progress in treating Covid-19. But the available therapies are few, the evidence for each is at least somewhat mixed, and they all have considerable limitations. Meanwhile, many Americans at the greatest risk for the worst outcomes don’t have access to key therapies that only work early on to help prevent severe symptoms and hospitalization.

“We are much better off than we were last spring,” says Manish Sagar, MD, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center and associate professor of medicine and microbiology at Boston University School of Medicine. “We have a number of proven treatments, and we have much more expertise about how to deal with the disease. If you were infected last March as compared to if you were infected today and you, unfortunately, were in the group that was likely to have severe complications, your likelihood of surviving is much higher now than it was back in March.”

Yet many hospitals don’t have the necessary equipment to administer some of the helpful therapies nor the range of specialists to share expertise in fields as diverse as infectious disease, pulmonology, hematology, and…

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Robert Roy Britt
Elemental

Editor of Aha! and Wise & Well on Medium + the Writer's Guide at writersguide.substack.com. Author of Make Sleep Your Superpower: amazon.com/dp/B0BJBYFQCB