![]() Priya Nori, an associate professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. "A lot of doctors in the community and even major academic centers are reticent to prescribe out of concern that there are going to be drug interactions or think that a patient can just ride out the virus," says Dr. The doctor wrote a Paxlovid prescription.Įven if you're eligible you might have to convince a doctor to prescribe the drug. A colleague who is under 50 told her doctor she was feeling worse each day after her positive COVID test and had a history of pneumonia. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends treatment for patients at risk of severe disease, hospitalization and death, which includes anyone who's 50 and older (risk increases with age), people who are unvaccinated and people with certain medical conditions, such as obesity, chronic lung disease, heart disease or a weakened immune system.īut exceptions can be made. In the U.S., not every COVID patient is eligible for a prescription. Your doctor will determine if you can stay off any interacting drugs for 5 days or possibly take a lower dose of certain drugs while on Paxlovid. The potentially concerning medications include most statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, and the opioid pain reliever hydrocodone. Your doctor will also need to review with you all drugs you take since Paxlovid can interact with over a dozen medications and possibly cause toxicity. Wait longer and the drug might not be effective. "So it stands to reason that interventions that prevent the virus from making more copies of itself would therefore lead to a lower risk of long COVID."Īccording to the prescribing guidelines, the 5-day treatment course of 3 pills, taken twice daily, should be started as soon as possible after a diagnosis of COVID-19 and within 5 days of symptom onset. ![]() Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an email. "We know that one of the key factors that predict long COVID is detectable virus in the bloodstream at the time of infection," Dr. And that could reduce the risk of long COVID as well as the risk of severe disease. How does it work? As NPR reported in an earlier story: "The antiviral drug stops the virus from replicating in cells. First, let's review some basics about the drug, which came on the market in December 2021.
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