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Comment by johntb86 | Hacker News Reader

Remdesivir could be great, and there are a lot of studies ongoing about it. However, it has a long production time - Gilead says 6 to 8 months: see https://www.gilead.com/purpose/advancing-global-health/covid.... They're only projecting to have 500,000 treatment courses by October, so it could only help a relatively small fraction of the people that will have coronavirus.

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Even a small volume of an effective treatment could still be helpful. Usage could be restricted just to patients with cases serious enough to otherwise require ventilators, for instance, which would both ease the strain on limited ICU resources and save lots of people who would otherwise die (since only around 10-30% of ventilated patients survive even with that treatment).

But antivirals tend to need to be given early to have a good effect. How will be know who is going to be severe?

By the time we have lots of it, we will have good statistics on demographics of people most likely to need it, so you could make educated guesses and still see a benefit.

To offer some perspective, in Montgomery County, just north of Philly (a suburban metro county harder hit than most), 10% of positive tests have been admitted to hospital, and 2.6% of positive tests have gone on ventilators.

So the subpopulation needing remdesivir is probably less than 5% of the positive cases (or 1250 of the 25,000 who tested positive here). BTW, the county population is 900,000.

Right, but it isn't a random sampling of that population that ends up on ventilators. For men over 65 with hypertension, it's about 50% of those who test positive.

...so a targeted application of anti-virals is definitely worthwhile.

You can make educated guesses based on age, preexisting conditions, etc.

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