Might be useful info if needed, could this also apply to the flu?

An article on what drugs they have used for patients .....



So "while you're waiting for the new miracle drug, it's worthwhile looking for existing drugs that could be repurposed" to treat new viruses, Morse told Live Science.

That's exactly the route doctors took to treat a 35-year-old man in Washington state, the first U.S. patient to have been infected with the new coronavirus.

When his symptoms worsened, the man was given an unapproved antiviral drug called remdesivir that was originally developed to treat Ebola, according to a case report published Jan. 31 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Doctors gave this drug to the patient by making a "compassionate use" request to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which allows experimental drugs to be given to people outside of clinical trials, usually in emergency situations. The patient, who was recently released from the hospital, didn't seem to experience any side effects of the drug.

They found that remdesivir stopped the virus from replicating in a lab dish. Similarly, the group found that chloroquine — an approved and widely used anti-malarial and autoimmune disease drug — was also effective in stopping the virus from spreading in human cells in the lab, the researchers reported in a short letter published Feb. 4 in the journal Cell Research.

What's more, both drugs were effective at low concentrations, and neither drug was highly toxic to human cells.


Instead of finding a single drug to treat the coronavirus, "I would suggest a cocktail of drugs that target different stages of replication," Reiss said. "This virus is probably going to be like a number of other viruses, and it will undergo mutation and selection, so if you use only one antiviral drug, you are going to ultimately select for resistance."

What's more, the treatment will be most effective when given to a patient early on, perhaps even before symptoms develop, she said. "Taken very early in the course of exposure, the antiviral drugs could have a real impact," she said. After someone is already in the hospital in respiratory distress and a high fever, "it is much harder to treat the infection, people are more likely to treat the disease."


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