These days, if you’re sick with COVID-19 and you’re at risk of getting worse, you could take pills like Paxlovid or get an antiviral infusion.
By now, these drugs have a track record of doing pretty well at keeping people with mild to moderate COVID-19 out of the hospital.
The availability of COVID-19 treatments has evolved over the past four years, pushed forward by the rapid accumulation of data and by scientists and doctors who pored over every new piece of information to create evidence-based guidance on how to best care for COVID-19 patients.
One very influential set of guidelines — viewed more than 50 million times and used by doctors around the world — is the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I think everyone [reading this] will remember [spring of] 2020, when we did not know how to treat COVID and around the country, people were trying different things,” recalls Dr. Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious diseases specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the NIH’s COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel. Around that time, people were popping tablets of hydroxychloroquine and buying livestock stores out of ivermectin, when there was no proof that either of these drugs worked against infection by the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (later studies showed that they are ineffective).