WHO Testing 4 Possible Treatments for COVID-19
SOLIDARITY and Discovery Trials give medical staff quick and easy way to participate in finding treatments for COVID-19.
It is also important to remember that the majority (80%) of people who contract COVID-19 will recover without any treatment at all. For those who require hospitalization and respiratory support, treatment options are desperately needed. WHO has launched the SOLIDARITY Trial and the Discovery Trial to test the 4 most promising therapies for COVID-19.
The gold standard for clinical trials is a double-blind randomized study. The patient doesn’t know if he or she is receiving the drug or not and the physician does not know if the patient is receiving the drug or not. Then the data are analyzed. In some cases, the treatment group benefits so substantially that the trial is changed to include all of the patients, or the treatment group shows a serious adverse effect and all treatment is stopped.
In the rapidly escalating pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, this gold standard trial design will take too long and be too difficult to implement on the global scale needed. So, WHO has launched the SOLIDARITY Trial and the Discovery Trial, which are not double-blind randomized trials. They are randomized, but not blinded.
