Britain is making dexamethasone available to patients on the country's National Health Service. The UK Department of Health said the drug had been approved to treat all hospitalised Covid-19 patients requiring oxygen, effective immediately. It said the UK had stockpiled enough to treat 200,000 patients.
"It's on almost every pharmacy shelf in every hospital, it's available throughout the world, and it's very cheap," said Peter Horby of Oxford University, one of the leaders of the trial that randomly assigned 2104 patients to get the drug and compared them with 4321 patients getting only usual care.
Since the virus first emerged in China late last year and spread around the globe, there have been more than 8 million confirmed cases and more than 435,000 deaths.
The US death toll has reached 116,526, according to Johns Hopkins University. That surpasses the number of Americans who died in World War I, when 116,516 were killed — although both death tolls are far from precise. The United States has more confirmed cases and deaths from Covid-19 than any country in the world.
Countries that appeared to have largely contained the virus are seeing new outbreaks.
In China, authorities locked down a third neighbourhood in Beijing to contain an outbreak that has infected more than 100 people.
Most of the cases have been linked to the capital's Xinfadi wholesale food market, and people lined up for massive testing of anyone who had visited it in the past two weeks or come in contact with them. About 9000 workers at the market were tested already.
- AP
