Rising COVID-19 cases are driving up the use of therapeutics, with Pfizer Inc's oral antiviral treatment Paxlovid seeing a 315% jump over the past four weeks, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.
"Increasingly, we'll see this virus hit people who are substantially older, frail, have underlying illnesses, or are distinctly immunocompromised," said Dr. William Schaffner, infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville."But we now have better treatments and many of those people will leave the hospital vertically rather than horizontally."
"The other thing that's going on is that we're providing the opportunity for spread; we've taken off our masks, we're going back to group activities both in business and for recreation," said Schaffner. There are currently nearly 20,000 people hospitalized across the country, up from 16,500 last week, according to a Reuters tally. Hospitalizations have also been steadily rising from a recent low of 12,000 in mid-April.Deaths, a lagging indicator, have held fairly steady at a daily average between of 300 to 500. COVID-19 has killed more than a million U.S. residents since the start of the pandemic.
Paxlovid is approved to keep high-risk individuals with COVID-19 from becoming seriously ill. It is meant to taken for five days beginning shortly after symptom onset.rival oral antiviral developed along with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. About 3.2 million molnupiravir courses are available, HHS data show.The White House said last month it was aiming to address unexpectedly light demand by expanding access to treatments like Paxlovid by doubling the number of locations at which they are available.