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Sweden continues to buy and use the antiviral drug remdesivir to treat COVID-19 patients, despite the World Health Organization (WHO)’s advice against doing do, Trend reports citing Xinhua.
“We believe that there is still a place for remdesivir,” Charlotta Bergquist, group manager and vaccine coordinator at the Swedish Medical Products Agency, told Swedish News Agency TT, explaining that the drug could help reduce hospital care time for a specific patient group.
COVID-19 patients who are at an early stage of the disease and who receive oxygen supplementation can go home from hospital several days earlier if they receive treatment of remdesivir, the report said.
She said it’s true that remdesivir did not have a proven effect on mortality of COVID-19 patients, but “WHO has only looked at mortality, which is a fairly rough measure.”
In November 2020, WHO issued a conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, as there is no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.
The latest statistics published by the Swedish Public Health Agency showed that until Friday a total of 523,486 people in the country have been infected with COVID-19, and 10,323 people have died of the disease.
As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in Sweden and some other countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, 236 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide — 63 of them in clinical trials — in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by WHO on Jan. 12.
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