Although the ongoing pandemic has made over 619,000 deaths worldwide and it infected over 15 million people, there is still plenty of hope that humanity won’t succumb to COVID-19. Japan’s health ministry just approved a new drug as a treatment for the novel coronavirus. It’s called dexamethasone, and it’s a cheap and widely used steroid.
The decision comes after a trial in Britain proved that the drug reduced the numbers of dead people among hospitalized patients who were suffering from COVID-19. Another drug approved by the health ministry of Japan as a weapon against the terrifying virus is Gilead Sciences Inc’s remdesivir.
Dexamethasone was the first drug to save lives
A clinical trial made by researchers from UK claims that dexamethasone is the first drug to save the lives of COVID-19 patients hospitalized. The results of the trial were released last Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The United Kingdom has been among the most affected European countries by the COVID-19 pandemic. There were over 295,000 cases of reported infections with the new coronavirus, and a death toll of more than 45,000 patients. The peak was reached on April 21, when 1,171 people infected with the disease died. Although the daily number of infected people is at a much slower rate in UK now, the horror is still not completely over. Around 100 people are dying daily because of the COVID-19 disease, but we expect this number to go down as well.
As for Japan, the Asian country seems to be hit by a second wave of COVID-19. The daily number of infected people is on the rise for about a month. 25, 736 people were infected with the new coronavirus in Japan, and 988 of them died since the start of the pandemic. Luckily enough, the daily number of deaths has gone down tremendously since June 20, even near to 0.
