Góðar fréttir

af Covid19:

"

Fergus WalshMedical correspondent@BBCFergusWalshon Twitter

• 20 June 2020

"It is a rare and welcome moment to be able to say something positive about the treatment of Covid-19.

Until this week there was no medicine proven to save lives. Now we have dexamethasone, which cuts the risk of death for patients on a ventilator by a third, and for those on oxygen by a fifth.

I seldom use the term "breakthrough", but it is worth it here.

It came about due to the persistence and single-mindedness of a small team at Oxford University, the co-operation of hospitals across the UK and the agreement of thousands of patients and their families.

The study that dexamethasone is part of is called Recovery - Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy. Clinical trials usually take months, even years to get under way and involve a few hundred patients. The Recovery trial was set up in nine days, and has recruited 11,500 Covid patients in 175 hospitals across the UK.

Speed was vital in order to catch the rising wave of hospital admissions here and to do so before doctors were overwhelmed.

The UK has had Europe's worst coronavirus outbreak with a terrible death toll. But that has also meant there were sufficient patient numbers here to create what is the world's biggest trial of Covid-19 treatments.

The trial is led by Prof Peter Horby, who had spent recent years looking at how best to prepare for and respond to disease X, an unknown pathogen that could cause a pandemic."

Fyrst var Remdesivir sme hjálpar í neyð.Svo dexamethasone. Nú vantar bara bóluefnið í gang frá Moderna eða öðrum svo að fréttir verði aftur góðar af þessu kínverska helvíti honum COVID19 Sars.