... to protect first responders, medical personnel as doctors, nurses, CNAs, respiratory therapists etc. so that they do not succumb to the virus or die while being treated in the hospital ICU ward.
Until the vaccine comes out about a year or year and one half from now it would be nice to have prophylactic medications tested and ready for the elderly, asthma sufferers, those with COPD, those currently using hand held inhalers, those pron to bronchitis etc. - many of these COVID -19 patients get pneumonia, are placed on ventilators, yet die because this virus is too strong for them to fight off or for their other morbidity factors to be overcome.
The search for any medications or off label use of medications is currently being done world wide to prevent needless death from this virus.
What is a prophylactic medication ?
Prophylactic: A preventive measure. The word comes from the Greek for "an advance guard," an apt term for a measure taken to fend off a disease or another unwanted consequence.
A prophylactic is a medication or a treatment designed and used to prevent a disease from occurring.
Such as COVID - 19.
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The CDC is working on this issue and the race to find helpful drugs
There are no US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs specifically for the treatment of patients with COVID-19. At present clinical management includes infection prevention and control measures and supportive care, including supplementary oxygen and mechanical ventilatory support when indicated. An array of drugs approved for other indications as well as several investigational drugs are being studied in several hundred clinical trials that are underway across the globe. The purpose of this document is to provide information on two of the approved drugs (chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine) and one of the investigational agents (remdesivir) currently in use in the United States.
Remdesivir
Remdesivir is an investigational intravenous drug with broad antiviral activity that inhibits viral replication through premature termination of RNA transcription and has in-vitro activity against SARS-CoV-2 and in-vitro and in-vivo activity against related betacoronaviruses [1-3].
There are currently four options for obtaining remdesivir for treatment of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and pneumonia in the United States:
A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored adaptive double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial of remdesivir versus placebo in COVID-19 patients with pneumonia and hypoxia is enrolling non-pregnant persons aged 18 years and older with oxygen saturation of ?94% on room air or requiring supplemental oxygen or mechanical ventilation (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04280705external icon). Exclusion criteria include alanine aminotransaminase or aspartate aminotransaminase levels >5 times the upper limit of normal, stage 4 severe chronic kidney disease or a requirement for dialysis (i.e., estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) <30);
Much more at link below,
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-options.html
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The World Health Organization (WHO) announced a large global trial, called SOLIDARITY, to find out whether any can treat infections with the new coronavirus for the dangerous respiratory disease. It’s an unprecedented effort—an all-out, coordinated push to collect robust scientific data rapidly during a pandemic. The study, which could include many thousands of patients in dozens of countries, has been designed to be as simple as possible so that even hospitals overwhelmed by an onslaught of COVID-19 patients can participate.
With about 15% of COVID-19 patients suffering from severe disease and hospitals being overwhelmed, treatments are desperately needed. So rather than coming up with compounds from scratch that may take years to develop and test, researchers and public health agencies are looking to repurpose drugs already approved for other diseases and known to be largely safe. They’re also looking at unapproved drugs that have performed well in animal studies with the other two deadly coronaviruses, which cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/who-launches-global-megatrial-four-most-promising-coronavirus-treatments
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