The news to date has been mixed, but this major study is hopeful:
A government-run study of Gilead’s remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat the novel coronavirus, showed that the medicine is effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus....
During an appearance alongside President Trump in the Oval Office, Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said the data are a “very important proof of concept” and that there was reason for optimism, but cautioned the data were not a “knockout"....
The study compared remdesivir to placebo in 800 patients, with neither patients nor physicians knowing who got the drug instead of a placebo, meaning that unconscious biases will not affect the conclusions.
The main goal of the study is the time until patients improve, with different measures of improvement depending on how sick they were to begin with. While the result means that the drug helps patients improve faster, it is not possible to say how dramatic those improvements are.
