New treatments offer hope with vaccines for 'interlocking benefits' against COVID-19

New treatments offer hope with vaccines for 'interlocking benefits' against COVID-19 COVID-19 vaccines offer the best protection against severe illness and death, but new antibody and antiviral treatments offer "interlocking benefits." Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY YahooNews

Several new COVID-19 treatments are expected to become available within the next few months.

Each drug fills a slightly different role, but together they could change the course of the illness, at least in the United States.

An experimental antiviral from Merck and a monoclonal antibody from AstraZeneca, along with a handful of other drugs making their way through the development process, could make COVID-19 a much less fearsome disease.

"We're at the point where if we could use these medications all to their interlocking benefits … we could really begin to control the impact this virus has on us, and in particular on the health care system," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease physician at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

COVID-19 won't go away, Schaffner emphasized, but we could make an uneasy peace with it, just as we do with the flu, which in a bad year kills as many as 52,000 people, most of them children and seniors. More than 700,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 in the past 20 months.

The drugs could be taken in sequence, offering layers of protection, both to prevent disease and then, if someone falls ill, to reduce the risk they will have a severe case of COVID-19.

Most need to be taken early in the course of infection, which makes it even more important for people to be able to get tested quickly, said Dr. Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston.

Additional coronavirus testing, recently provided by the government, should alert people sooner that they are infected.

"If you're in a situation where you are not able to get tested or or it takes too long to get the result back," then the drugs won't work, Gandhi said. "Testing and treatment go hand in glove." ...