HealthDay Reports: Five-Day Course of Remdesivir Beneficial in Severe COVID-19
No significant difference was seen in the five- and 10-day course of remdesivir for severe COVID-19 without mechanical ventilation.
Five-Day Course of Remdesivir Beneficial in Severe COVID-19
FRIDAY, May 29, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- There seems to be no significant difference between a five- and 10-day course of remdesivir for patients with severe COVID-19 not requiring mechanical ventilation, according to a study published online May 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Jason D. Goldman, M.D., M.P.H., from the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues conducted a randomized phase 3 trial involving hospitalized patients with confirmed severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 infection, oxygen saturation of 94 percent or less, and radiologic evidence of pneumonia. A total of 397 patients were randomly assigned to receive remdesivir for either five or 10 days (200 and 197, respectively).
Patients randomly assigned to the 10-day group had significantly worse clinical status at baseline compared with those randomly assigned to the five-day group. The researchers found that by day 14, a clinical improvement of 2 points or more on the ordinal scale occurred in 64 and 54 percent of patients in the five- and 10-day groups, respectively. Patients in the 10-day group had a distribution in clinical status at day 14 that was similar to that among patients in the five-day group after adjustment for baseline clinical status.