Doctors say growing 'toolbox' of coronavirus treatments provide bright spot in pandemic fight

There's no COVID-19 cure yet, but health care workers can still count many tiny victories that are making the fight easier.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, doctors "were flying blind" as they tried to treat a disease with mysterious symptoms and very little research, Jose Pascual, a critical care doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, tells The Washington Post. But health care workers everywhere have since "devised a toolbox, albeit a limited and imperfect one, of drugs and therapies" they believe are improving patients' chances of survival every day, the Post reports.

When Penn Medicine hospitals first started receiving coronavirus patients, they were ready to focus on patients' lungs, so they stockpiled ventilators and trained workers to treat breathing complications, Pascual told the Post. Yet coronavirus patients soon started throwing doctors "curveballs" in the form of kidney, liver, skin, and brain complications, Pascual described. Doctors around the country also noted how seemingly healthy patients could actually have "abnormally low oxygen levels," the Post writes.

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But those shocking developments quickly became lessons. Hospitals started quickly measuring oxygen levels in any suspected coronavirus patients, and learned how to boost breathing support for patients. They knew to look for unexpected side effects in other parts of the body. And after some once-promising drugs proved unhelpful in the coronavirus fight, doctors have been able to rule them out in favor of more effective drugs.

Of course, there's still no definitive cure or even treatment regimen for COVID-19. Doctors are all using experimental approaches that will have to be further researched through randomized clinical trials before they're approved for general use. Read more at The Washington Post.