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Date Published: 29/04/2022

ARCHIVED - Numerous Covid patients in Murcia are being treated with new anti-viral pills

ARCHIVED ARTICLE

Hospitals in the Region of Murcia have been using Pfizer's new Paxlovid treatment for a month now

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Numerous Covid patients in Murcia are being treated with new anti-viral pills

At the end of March, the first 400 new Paxlovid anti-viral oral treatments against Covid arrived in the Region of Murcia, and since then, 19 patients with coronavirus have already benefitted from the new drug.

Paxlovid, the Pfizer drug that has been adopted to reinforce the existing pharmaceutical arsenal against the disease, can only be used in specific cases, but reduces the risk of hospitalisation and death by up to 89%.

This new antiviral is specifically used for high-risk patients with haematological diseases who have tested positive less than five days after the onset of symptoms and who are not "seriously ill enough" to require hospitalisation.

Dr José Miguel Gómez Verdú, from the Infectious Diseases team of the Morales Meseguer Internal Medicine Department and member of the hospital's Covid group, explained that "these patients are the ones to whom the oral antiviral is administered to prevent the disease from progressing to a severe case of pneumonia requiring hospital admission".

According to data from the Regional Ministry of Health, in the first month of using the Paxlovid drug, 19 patients in Murcia have been treated with the pill. In 11 of these cases the pill was prescribed by the hospitals where they were being monitored, while in the remaining eight cases it was prescribed by primary care teams at health centres.

The first batch of amost 400 treatments which arrived in the Murcia Region in mid-April was boosted with a second delivery of a further 930 treatments of Paxlovid from the Ministry of Health to "ensure sufficient resources and increase the number of people who can benefit from it".

A total of 344,000 complete treatments of the drug Paxlovid have been purchased by Spain's Ministry of Health, and 50,000 of these are expected to arrive in Spain in the first quarter of the year.

Prior to Paxlovid's endorsement, only one other compound had been authorised by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) as an oral treatment for Covid: Molnupiravir, from Merck. However, the results were not as promising and only reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death in Covid patients by 50%.

In contrast to other regions in Spain, the use of Pfizer's anti-viral drug in the Murcia Region has been limited to hospital/clinical environments, and the drug is not available in pharmacies.

Now read: How to get a Covid passport and How to make an appointment for a vaccination or booster jab in Spain

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