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Corner Brook, N.J. — No one wants to get sick, but anyone diagnosed with COVID-19 needs to find effective, safe and affordable medicine to treat the virus. You can now participate in the targeted research.
NL Health Services is participating in a national research project called CanTreatCOVID. This publicly funded study is investigating a drug to see if it can help people with COVID-19 feel better faster, keep them out of the hospital, and prevent them from getting sick longer. There is.
The project is asking 10,000 adults from across Canada who have recently tested positive for COVID-19 to participate in the research study. Participants must be over 50 years old or have a chronic illness if between 18 and 49 years old.
Participants who will be paid a $120 trial participation fee must have symptoms, test positive for COVID-19 on a self-reported rapid antigen test within five days of trial enrollment, and be willing to submit a health status update. Must be. His next 36 weeks.
Half of the participants will receive paxlobid, a drug used to treat symptoms of coronavirus infection, while the other half will not receive the drug. Participants must agree to be randomly selected to receive the drug or not.
The treatment course of Paxrobid is 1 tablet per day for 5 days.
Strains with low virulence
Dr. Peter Daly is the project’s lead physician in Newfoundland and Labrador, an infectious disease physician with the Newfoundland Health Service, and an associate professor of medicine at Memorial University in St. John’s.
Paxrobid appears to have been an effective tool in the early stages of the pandemic, before vaccinations became available and the more virulent delta virus spread, keeping people out of the hospital and preventing deaths, Daly said. explained.
“At the moment, we don’t know if this drug will help because there is a less virulent Omicron strain of the virus,” he said of the reason behind the national research project.
The pandemic in 2023 will look different than in 2021, with the majority of the population vaccinated and building natural immunity.
Still, the new coronavirus infection is not going away. Although symptoms are less severe, fewer people are hospitalized and deaths from COVID-19 are rare, more people are now infected in Newfoundland and Labrador. With the onset of influenza season, winter is also a time when the number of people infected with the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is expected to increase sharply.
“That’s why this study is timely and why we want people to know they can participate in this study,” Daly said.
Effectiveness of paxrobid
So far, about 30 people from Newfoundland and Labrador have signed up to participate in the trial, which is funded by the federal government and the Canadian Health Research Agency.
Paxlovid will be provided free of charge to anyone diagnosed with COVID-19, regardless of whether they participate in this project.
“We want to know not only whether patients recover quickly, but also whether they develop symptoms of COVID-19 over a long period of time,” Daly said, adding that some people may be suffering from COVID-19. He alluded to a variety of long-term problems that develop after infection.
“This drug has the potential to prevent these things from happening, so if we can measure that, that would be an advantage for this drug. …What’s more important for us is to answer whether this drug helps. , so that you can be informed about future use of this drug.”
Daly also said the study was considered an adaptive trial, meaning that once questions about paxlobid are satisfactorily answered, the study can continue by asking questions about other drugs.
