Coronavirus Breakthrough: Dexamethasone proves first cheap, widely available life-saving drug for seriously ill Coronavirus patients

BBC ^ | 06/16/2020 | Michelle Roberts

[SeekAndFind]

A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives of patients seriously ill with coronavirus.

The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say.

The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.

It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth.

Had the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the pandemic, up to 5,000 lives could have been saved, researchers say.

And it could be of huge benefit in poorer countries with high numbers of Covid-19 patients.

About 19 out of 20 patients with coronavirus recover without being admitted to hospital.

Of those who are admitted, most also recover but some may need oxygen or mechanical ventilation.

And these are the high-risk patients dexamethasone appears to help.

The drug is already used to reduce inflammation in a range of other conditions.

And it appears to help stop some of the damage that can happen when the body's immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus.

This over-reaction, a cytokine storm, can be deadly.

In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, about 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and compared with more than 4,000 who were not.

For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%.

For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.

Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality - and it reduces it significantly. It's a major breakthrough."

[SeekAndFind]

The treatment is up to 10 days of dexamethasone and it costs about £5 per patient.

So essentially it costs £35 to save a life.

This is a drug that is globally available.

[Diogenesis]

hydroxychloroquine specific; this is not.

that is why it is pushed by those who want Americans
DEAD.

DEAD or vaccinated with CDC/FDA/Gates/FauXi/Soros
retroviruses.

[Mopp4]

About 19 out of 20 patients with coronavirus recover without being admitted to hospital.

Where has this statistic been hiding ? You mean the shut-down may have not been necessary ????

[Starboard]

If Trump mentions a single word about it this will be called ‘anecdotal’ and dangerous.

[RayChuang88]

If Trump mentions a single word about it this will be called ‘anecdotal’ and dangerous.

And everyone knows that will happen. 🙄

[newzjunkey]

Your post make no sense. Hydroxy seems to have been a good idea that didn’t pan out. It’s time to move on if something better is available. This might be doing even better than remdesivir and that’s not a bad thing.

[xkaydet65]

It’s cheap and readily available. Big Pharma exec calls FDA director in 3...2...1...

[bk1000]

Impossible. Everyone knows those old drugs don’t work against Trump flu. It has to be something new, under patent, and very expensive.

/s

[CedarDave]

HCQ works well when in combination with zinc and an antibiotic. By itself not so effective. It’s the combination that produces results but the anti-Trump media ignore it to make Trump look bad and because the combination is absurdly cheap compared to the potential profits that could be made by big phama if they found an effective drug.

The drug in this article will likewise be panned as ineffective because it is cheap notwithstanding if it works, and really disparaged if Trump mentions it.

[Tunehead54]

HCQ + Zinc and reference bump. Its the Zinc that destroys the virus - the HCQ is a transport for the Zinc into cells.

Multiple studies are HCQ only. More junk science. Trump referenced “Zelensky” (indirectly) - ZINC is critical.

IMHO.

[DoodleDawg]

So essentially it costs £35 to save a life.

LOL! A drug that costs £35 in the UK probably costs $5,000 here. Or will soon.

Still, it's not a cure but it does help in a significant number of severe cases so it's a good start.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Hydroxy seems to have been a good idea that didn’t pan out. It’s time to move on if something better is available.

1) Hydroxychloroquine WORKS at the early stages of Covid-19. It does not work well when a patient is already hospitalized and seriously ill. Its purpose is to PREVENT hospitalization. Every single successful doctor that you talk to will tell you this, all those studies that don’t “pan out” ( as you use the word ), simply shows that it was not used as intended.

2) Based on what I have been reading, Dexamethasone works for ALREADY HOSPITALIZED and SERIOUSLY ILL patients.

3) What we see in this Covid-19 saga is that we actually have MORE THAN ONE effective treatment for the disease in its various stages.

4) BOTH ARE CHEAP AND READILY AVAILABLE ( unlike the vaccines still to be developed )

Let’s use every single scientific weapon we have at our disposal and ignore the politics.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: LOL! A drug that costs £35 in the UK probably costs $5,000 here. Or will soon.

Can you elaborate as to why ?

[ncpatriot]

Now we can open up the states!!!

Open, Mr Cuomo

Open, Mr Cooper

[I want the USA back]

If Trump ever mentions that this new drug is a potential life saver, the media will immediately call the drug a deadly poison.

[WildHighlander57]

Wow! Thanks for posting this!

[going hot]

I buy 100 cc bottles of it for $2.38 each. 4mg/ml

Bottled Water costs more.

[CharlesWayneCT]

On the other hand, while the change is “significant”, it is not really an effective treatment, in that lots of people who get the treatment still die.

This is another example of how, in the interest of doing some “double-blind study”, they withheld information that might have saved thousands of lives.

Why are we just hearing about this? Why, when they first saw possible positive effects, didn’t they announce it, and get hospitals around the world using it? It wasn’t a dangerous drug, after all.

[CharlesWayneCT]

I hope remdesiver is a lot better than this. At best, the study shows it saved 30% of those who were dying on ventilators, and 20% of those who needed oxygen. 70% of those who were dying still died on ventilators, and 80% of those on oxygen who were dying still died.

That is obviously much better than nothing, but is not a very good treatment.

Heck, the HCQ did that well according to several studies, when properly administered with zinc and an antibiotic. HCQ mostly did poorly when it was given in 4 times the lethal dose because the doctor confused the name of the drug with another drug, and it did poorly when you mailed it to people after they reported online that they had been exposed to the virus, so that the people took it days after exposure.

[SeekAndFind]

The British government’s chief science advisor called it “a ground-breaking development in our fight against the disease.” Why would a steroid work on a virus like SARS-Cov-2? It might not, actually; rather, the steroid may be mitigating one of the most notorious complications of COVID-19, the “cytokine storm” that happens in some patients when their immune system goes haywire in trying to fight the virus off and begins attacking the body itself. Steroids reduce inflammation. It may be that dexamethasone is suppressing the inflammation in some far-gone patients just enough to help them beat back the virus and eventually recover.

That would also explain why it has no benefit on patients who are infected but don’t require oxygen. In a mild-ish case like that, when the immune system hasn’t turned hyperactive, a steroid logically might not do much of anything. If that’s what’s happening here, that the drug is essentially mitigating fatal side effects of COVID-19 rather than the virus itself, then it’s of no use as a prophylactic. It’s for people who are at death’s door.

Speaking of higher survival rates, a mystery has begun to brew here at home. While it’s true that some states like Texas and Arizona are seeing worrisome spikes, the national picture overall continues to look a bit brighter. Yesterday just 375 deaths were recorded, pushing the seven-day average in the U.S. down to 700 or so after it routinely topped 2,000 daily on weekdays in April. Check out the trend via Worldometer:

Good stuff. But here’s the mysterious part: The trend in confirmed cases doesn’t resemble it. It’s basically flat, not downward.

If roughly the same number of people are getting sick each day as were getting sick weeks ago, and yet the number of deaths is declining, why is that? The case fatality rate is clearly dropping — but how come?