Helen MacDonald

And I was quite pleased to see that the New England Journal of Medicine have put out a trial of a treatment.

So they have published...

a negative study looking at hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who have saturation of oxygen of less than 94% on air or a ratio of partial pressure of oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen of less than 300 milligrams of mercury.

And they compared lopinavir, ritonavir at 400 and 100 milligrams respectively for two weeks with

or standard care.

And they measured the time from randomization to improvement.

They were looking for a two point shift on a seven category scale or to discharge from hospital, whichever came first.

And the study randomized 200 people split between these two groups, and they didn't find that there was a difference.

But it was kind of pleasing to see that some of these first studies of treatments were coming through.

This one was done in China.

There was a linked editorial with it, which was interesting to read, particularly the comments around sort of, is this it for this drug combination?

Do you just sort of give up and say, well, this doesn't work?

Or do you carry on?

Because there was some suggestion of improvement in mortality, but these were very small numbers.

And there was some evidence that the standard care group was sicker.

They also picked a really sick population of patients.

And there was a question about whether the treatment was sort of being given too late in the disease course to have that much effect.

But great to see some trials coming.

And I think this is an issue that we should come back to next week and take a much closer look

at what trials are going on and what we're perhaps going to be able to anticipate seeing in the near future.