These promising coronavirus treatments are saving lives

But in the most severe cases, dexamethasone represents a potential lifeline.“We announced results at lunchtime, and by teatime here, the chief medical officers here in the U.K. went to every hospital, saying they should adopt this as standard practice,” says Oxford cardiologist Martin Landray, a co-lead investigator on the RECOVERY trial. “I don’t mind the preprints; we’re having a hard time with the press releases,” he says, pointing to other instances when media announcements of promising treatments have gone months without follow-up.How has RECOVERY arrived at clear answers, when other trials in the age of COVID-19 have faltered? In partnership with the U.K.’s National Health Service, the RECOVERY trial successfully has recruited about 15,000 patients so far, which Landray says amounts to one in six of the U.K.’s hospitalized COVID-19 cases since the trial began.On June 25, the Infectious Diseases Society of America updated its treatment guidelines to conditionally recommend dexamethasone, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health followed suit in its own guidelines. “You could understand that if this treatment was given at the very first stage of the disease, when the virus was taking occupancy in the lungs, you would have a good effect—but here we were, able to pull people back from going on a ventilator and accelerate their recovery.”While the overall stats look promising, this early trial is small, so researchers can’t be sure yet whether the drug helps a lot, or only slightly. The greater understanding doctors now have of the disease and support strategies almost certainly helped reduce U.S. deaths when COVID-19 spiked for a second time this summer.“It’s true that having drugs like remdesivir and steroids is very helpful, [but] we don't want to forget about the importance of good medical care and critical care,” says Helen Boucher, the chief of geographic medicine and infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts.