Simon Wade
ANTIVIRAL drugs used in Alicante province hospitals are keeping admissions at the same level as January 2021, despite Covid transmission rates being 10 times higher.
Along with the inclusion of various vaccine rollouts, the drug’s application is preventing a potentially catastrophic overloading of the health system.
Patients admitted to ICUs in the first week of January 2021 numbered 72 throughout Alicante province.
This Friday, January 7, the number admitted is only 74.
However, some 10,116 people were infected with Covid-19, compared to 1,356 infected on the same day last year.
Dr. Félix Gutiérrez, head of Internal Medicine at the General Hospital of Elche, explained: “Intervention with these drugs in immunosuppressed patients reduces the severity of the disease, and the probability that they will be admitted to the ICU.”
Not everyone is treated in such a way, as the drugs are used on a case-by-case basis, with a detailed follow-up of each patient carried out.
Gutiérrez continued, “Some of these drugs are already available, but the newest ones are going to be used progressively depending on the basis of the disease that each patient presents and case by case.”
During the worst part of the pandemic in Alicante, mid-January to mid-February 2021, the average number of deaths was 40 a day.
Many drugs used for treatment in that time had no antiviral molecules at all, but newer drugs introduced since then do.
Currently, the average number of daily deaths is less than five.
The key drugs now used alter the replication process of the virus and of those patients that can’t produce their own antibodies, admission to ICU is avoided.
Beforehand, these particular patients were almost guaranteed an ICU bed because of their inability to fight any infection at all.
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