Hacker News Reader

Comment by lee | Hacker News Reader

> "We have viable treatments that work and could be prescribed en masse. Not discussed, not mentioned."

Can you explicitly mention what those treatments are? I'm genuinely curious.

There are various antiviral drugs which are orders of magnitude more expensive, have mediocre efficacy and a worse side effect profile compared to any of the main vaccines, and must be started within days of initial infection to work properly.

They are a great addition (besides vaccines and non-pharmaceutical public health measures) for treating high-risk patients for whom the vaccines don’t provide perfect protection (e.g. the very elderly and immune compromised), but a poor primary response.

We have excellent outcomes with monoclonal antibody-based drugs (the expensive route). Monoclonal is interesting because we may be able to take it preemptively. We have excellent results with steroids, vitamins, weight loss and exercise (low cost).

One way to search (and ignore random people like myself) for this, is to look for different countries treatment protocols (they are often published into other languages). There is a lot of serious people working hard trying to find good solutions.

Here are the latest COVID-19 treatment guidelines. They are very effective in preventing deaths when applied early and aggressively. Unfortunately many patients wait too long before seeking care, and many physicians still don't follow the protocol.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/about-the-gui...

The anti-covid pill from Pfizer looks impressive:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pfizer-s-good-news...

I thought I remember reading something early on about protease inhibitors and COVID, cool to see that is coming out now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com