Current best evidence for clinical care (more info)
BACKGROUND: Although several therapeutic agents have been evaluated for the treatment of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), no antiviral agents have yet been shown to be efficacious.
METHODS: We conducted a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of intravenous remdesivir in adults who were hospitalized with Covid-19 and had evidence of lower respiratory tract infection. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either remdesivir (200 mg loading dose on day 1, followed by 100 mg daily for up to 9 additional days) or placebo for up to 10 days. The primary outcome was the time to recovery, defined by either discharge from the hospital or hospitalization for infection-control purposes only.
RESULTS: A total of 1062 patients underwent randomization (with 541 assigned to remdesivir and 521 to placebo). Those who received remdesivir had a median recovery time of 10 days (95% confidence interval [CI], 9 to 11), as compared with 15 days (95% CI, 13 to 18) among those who received placebo (rate ratio for recovery, 1.29; 95% CI, 1.12 to 1.49; P<0.001, by a log-rank test). In an analysis that used a proportional-odds model with an eight-category ordinal scale, the patients who received remdesivir were found to be more likely than those who received placebo to have clinical improvement at day 15 (odds ratio, 1.5; 95% CI, 1.2 to 1.9, after adjustment for actual disease severity). The Kaplan-Meier estimates of mortality were 6.7% with remdesivir and 11.9% with placebo by day 15 and 11.4% with remdesivir and 15.2% with placebo by day 29 (hazard ratio, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.52 to 1.03). Serious adverse events were reported in 131 of the 532 patients who received remdesivir (24.6%) and in 163 of the 516 patients who received placebo (31.6%).
CONCLUSIONS: Our data show that remdesivir was superior to placebo in shortening the time to recovery in adults who were hospitalized with Covid-19 and had evidence of lower respiratory tract infection. (Funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and others; ACTT-1 ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04280705.).
| Discipline / Specialty Area | Score |
|---|---|
| Infectious Disease | |
| Intensivist/Critical Care | |
| Public Health | |
| Hospital Doctor/Hospitalists | |
| Internal Medicine | |
| Family Medicine (FM)/General Practice (GP) | |
| General Internal Medicine-Primary Care(US) | |
A very good study. The criteria for severity of COVID-19 should be in the text not in the supplementary data.
Disappointing that a much-touted drug was not more useful. The likelihood of significant improvement, however, was not met. The conclusions were rather wishy-washy.
Important and timely results.
This study offers clinical proof-of-concept for remdesivir in COVID-19 disease. There is a lot of missing data on co-existing conditions that could conceivably impact on the study outcomes. The Kaplan-Meier Estimates of Cumulative Recoveries indicate that although overall data show a clear-cut benefit of remdesivir over placebo, those receiving either high-flow oxygen or non-invasive mechanical ventilation and those receiving mechanical ventilation or ECMO demonstrate a lack or loss of separation of curves with time. This suggests that the benefit of remdesivir on recovery time could be of less prominence with increasing severity of illness. A larger sample size in a future study should specifically address this issue. Given the overlapping confidence intervals in some of the preliminary subgroup analyses (Figure 3), the full analysis of the completed data set is eagerly awaited as are further results of larger clinical trials.
Extremely important. I hope the final results are more adequately powered for mortality.
Important study but a shame that the DSMB decided to stop the study prematurely as the difference in mortality was not significant. We might miss the chance and never get the true value of treatment on mortality.