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HARRISBURG – The Pennsylvania Secretary of Health, Dr. Rachel Levine, answered WKOK’s questions Thursday on the drug Remdesivir and about how we’ll handle a surge in COVID-19 cases this fall.
Dr. Levine says Remdesivir was developed for treatment of Ebola after 2014 when there was an outbreak in West Africa. She says it’s anti-viral, although Ebola is a different type of virus it has been tested on patients with Covid-19. There has been a study that shows it can be effective.
“A game changer would be probably not what I would say, but I think it’s very promising. Of course in science and in medicine, more studies need to be done, to see how effective it is, on which patients it should be used, what dose should be used, how long it should be used for. All that still needs to be determined, but it is still very promising,” she said.
As for a summer or fall resurgence of coronavirus, what might we do differently because of things we learned from our response this spring? Dr. Levine says the challenge in the spring was getting testing through CDC and Federal Government. But testing is now expanding and we’re seeing more capacity in the state and commercial laboratories, hospitals, and health systems.
She said they had a great call with the federal government this week on the topic, “With the assistant secretary of health, Admiral Brett P. Giroir, from health and human services, as well as the CDC and the FDA, about all the different components of testing, the swabs, the media for the viral test tubes, the platform for testing, and for extraction. All the different aspects of that and they gave us a lot of information.”
In the fall, Dr. Levine says they hope that even more testing is available, “You know, we’ve been discussing this with the governor on a regular basis. From an aspirational point of view, if we have much more testing, how would we use that to deal with or hopefully prevent a surge, increased cases, in the fall and we’re developing that testing now.
We’ll have her daily reports on WKOK each weekday afternoon, and we’ll post her remarks on WKOK.com.
