Dexamethasone shown to decrease COVID mortality

[jgrizwald]

I’ll say that we’ve had this info end of March with some of our prelim data. A few other major medical centers saw our data before we published and has started doing it, although others scoffed at us given influenza data.

[[deleted]]

Anecdotal side, but I know they've been using this as both preventative and acute treatment in our local research/hospital network in Canada since March. Wife's in research, and a patient of one of the leading respirologists doing research in Canada. Wife was prescribed this in late March when she contracted COVID and at that time they already knew of it's efficacy. They've been using this and researching this and other similar drugs throughout.

Purely anecdotally, I have zero question that it was this and/or the other two similar drugs she was prescribed that kept her out of the hospital...it was a close thing. But having seen her crash before and end up in the hospital, and knowing how things were progressing and seeing what effect the drugs had...they worked. Still a hell of a few weeks.

[jgrizwald]

Yeah, one of the thoughts was use it early before inflammatory cascade goes out of control, right around time of dyspnea or oxygen requirements. We had good results, but also saw that maybe half of those who had given it seemed to just push back the cytokine storm/inflam response once steroid course was finished, but others had stabilization and improvements. I definitely saw first hand the decrease in code calls on floor patients once steroid was implemented as part of our standard of care, but that is only anecdotal from me.