The world came to know about a new corona virus infection spreading from Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Over the following 3 months, this respiratory pathogen, named as nCoV-2019, SARS CoV-2, or Covid-19, has affected many in the most populous regions of the world and there are growing concerns about it being a pandemic. World Health Organization (WHO) has reported infection in all continents in its Situation Report-42 published on 2 March 2020 and >3000 deaths (https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200302-sitrep-42-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=224c1add_2). Although it causes a flu-like respiratory illness, the mortality is low among previously healthy, young individuals but high in elderly and critically ill.1 However, the low percent mortality has already transformed into a big absolute number (>3000 individuals) and counting. Each life is precious and there is a global movement to find treatment for this disease.
As yet, no definite prevention or cure is available for COVID-19. Lately, some reports have surfaced about various drugs indicated for other viral illness, being tried for this disease due to existing evidence in two related disorders, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. To critically evaluate the existing options, an attempt has been made to list the drugs considered potentially useful in corona virus infections including the previous outbreaks of SARS and MERS and are tabulated (Table 1) to derive lessons from the existing scientific literature.
Table 1.
Syndromes related to corona virus and their management
This is highly imperative that although new drug and vaccine development is in progress, existing treatment may be applied to save precious lives. The information in media that corona virus has no effective treatment has already created panic in the masses and resultant lock down in many parts of the world. Hence, it could be helpful to mitigate the impression of “no treatment” and resultant fear around the world.
Footnotes
Conflicts of interest: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest related to the subject matter or materials discussed in this article.
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