Steroid breakthrough raises virus hopes, despite China outbreak

LONDON, United Kingdom, June 17 ------ Britain will start giving seriously ill coronavirus patients a basic steroid treatment hailed as a breakthrough to help reduce the global pandemic's death toll even as worrying new outbreaks surfaced in China and elsewhere. An "extremely severe" cluster of cases in Beijing cast doubt over efforts to get the virus under control although Tuesday's news from Britain came as a boost after months of grim statistics.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell meanwhile warned that the US economy is unlikely to recover as long as "significant uncertainty" remains over the course of the pandemic. Researchers led by a team from the University of Oxford administered the widely available steroid dexamethasone to more than 2,000 severely ill COVID-19 patients. Among those who could only breathe with the help of a ventilator, dexamethasone reduced deaths by 35 percent.

"Dexamethasone is the first drug to be shown to improve survival in COVID-19. This is an extremely welcome result," said Peter Horby, professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford. "Dexamethasone is inexpensive, on the shelf, and can be used immediately to save lives worldwide." Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock said patients would start to receive the drug immediately.

"This is great news and I congratulate the Government of the UK, the University of Oxford, and the many hospitals and patients in the UK who have contributed to this lifesaving scientific breakthrough," WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Beijing outbreak

More than eight million people have now been infected by the virus worldwide since it first emerged in China late last year, claiming 436,813 lives so far as the tolls still surge in Latin America and South Asia. In Europe, caseloads and death rates have broadly declined. The UK, however, is still struggling with the world's third largest death toll and New Zealand -- which had ended community transmission -- said two new cases reported there were recent arrivals from Britain.

European countries are eager to drop coronavirus restrictions to save the imminent summer tourist season but Spain warned that it may quarantine British visitors should the UK persist with its plan to quarantine all overseas arrivals. The latest reminder of the underlying threat came from China, which had largely brought its outbreak under control, as 27 infections were reported in Beijing, where a new cluster linked to a wholesale food market has sparked mass testing and neighborhood lockdowns.

"The epidemic situation in the capital is extremely severe," Beijing city spokesman Xu Hejian warned, as the number of confirmed infections rose to 106. Beijing authorities urged residents to not leave the city and closed schools again as officials scrambled to contain the outbreak. In the US, the central bank chief Powell once again pledged the Fed will use all of its policy tools to help ensure recovery from the outbreak which he said has inflicted the worst pain on low-income and minority groups. Despite a surprising rebound in employment in May, the US economy has shed nearly 20 million jobs since February and the contraction of GDP in the April-June quarter "is likely to be the most severe on record," he said.

Source: philstar.com