Traditional Chinese medicine at a hospital in Wuhan. The Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak has already claimed more than 3000 lives in 11 countries. In addition to China, fatal cases have been reported in Australia, Iran, Spain, Italy, the United States, Thailand, Taiwan, France, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, for a total of 165 deaths.
At the same time, however, more than 50,000 people with officially confirmed coronavirus infections recovered. For 15 consecutive days, the number of patients cured has exceeded the number of new cases reported. At the same time, despite the best efforts of scientists around the world, there is still no vaccine against the virus – and none is expected for several months.
Several companies in the U.S. and other countries are conducting tests on mice and guinea pigs, but human trials of the vaccine will not begin until April at the earliest, and it will not be until the end of the year that its effectiveness can be confirmed and all the bureaucratic formalities can be completed.
So how do they successfully treat patients? Since the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic, a variety of drugs have been tried to treat the infection – mainly symptomatic drugs, i.e. not directed against the disease itself, but against its typical manifestations. It is important to note that there are no specific symptoms of Covid-19 – in this sense, the disease is not significantly different from any other respiratory viral infection such as the common cold or the flu, and it can also progress to pneumonia. Almost all patients have a fever, develop general weakness, and 60% of patients develop a dry cough. About one person in three complains of muscle aches and difficulty breathing, although these symptoms typically do not appear until about the fifth day after the onset of illness.
Can the Russian “Arbidol” protect against the coronavirus? Answered by a British expert. Headache and sore throat have been reported in a few patients. In mid-February, the Lancet published a letter from Chinese doctors who have developed their own treatment algorithm for patients who present with cough, chills, or sore throat. After a general blood test and a CT scan of the chest, patients are tested for viral pneumonia and the coronavirus itself. If the result is negative, the patient is prescribed standard antibiotics – azithromycin or amoxicillin. If positive, the patient is isolated and treated with respiratory fluoroquinolones and arbidol.
In severe cases, when blood oxygen saturation drops below 93%, monoxacin and the synthetic antibiotic linezolid, typically used to treat resistant infections, are added to the therapy. As mentioned above, all of these drugs are aimed at alleviating the common symptoms of the disease. There is still no specific therapy for Covid-19, but development is underway. In mid-February, Chinese doctors discovered that chloroquine, a drug widely used to prevent and treat malaria, is effective against the coronavirus. Now they want to include it in the official recommendations for treating Covid-19 patients. Several other drugs are in clinical trials. One of them is umifenovir (or rather arbidol): doctors are trying to understand how effective it is at fighting coronavirus infection specifically. Two other potential drugs – lopinavir, which is commonly used to treat HIV patients, and remdesivir, which was originally developed to treat Ebola fever and Marburg virus.
The last resort that Chinese doctors use to save almost hopeless patients is to inject blood plasma from patients who have already recovered. Similarly, severe cases of atypical SARS pneumonia were successfully treated in 2003. As a result, in 2014 the WHO recommended the use of similar injections for the treatment of Ebola fever, and a year later for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus. More than 85% of all confirmed coronavirus cases were reported in China. As a result, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) preparations were prescribed to almost all hospitalized patients, in addition to the usual medications. According to the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, a total of more than 60,000 people with confirmed Covid-19 infection have been treated with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). According to local media reports, patients who receive both types of treatment recover better than those who only take “ordinary” drugs. In the city of Hangzhou, for example, an 88-year-old patient who had been hospitalized in critical condition was cured.
The formula for TCM treatment was developed at the Eighth People’s Hospital in Guangzhou, recognized by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Guangdong Province, and officially approved by the regional authorities. Yu Jianhua, head of the traditional Chinese medicine department at the Hangzhou Hospital for Infectious Diseases, told China’s CCTV that his patients take two traditional remedies: one helps clear phlegm from the lungs, while the other fights inflammation. According to the Xinhua news agency, the chief physician of one of the Beijing hospitals, Wang Ronbin, stated that the treatment of Covid-19 patients with the mixture Qingfei Paidu (Цинфей пайду) in addition to the main therapy is particularly effective. This traditional remedy is made from medicinal herbs and other plants, including Chinese thuja and licorice root.