Coronavirus update: Remdesivir approved as Australia’s first COVID-19 treatment only available for severe cases – ABC News

Australia’s first COVID-19 treatment option, Remdesivir, has been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for people hospitalised with severe cases.
Meanwehile an advance team from the World Health Organization (WHO) has left for China to organise an investigation into the origins of the virus.
This story will be regularly updated throughout Saturday and was last updated at 12:30am
Saturday’s key moments:
Remdesivir approved as Australia’s first treatment
Australia’s first COVID-19 treatment option, Remdesivir, has been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
The drug received provisional approval for use in adults with severe COVID-19 symptoms as a promising treatment option to reduce hospitalisation times.
However it will not be available to everybody, and can only be used in adults and adolescents in hospital with severe infections.
While the approval is a major milestone in Australia’s struggle against the pandemic, it has not been shown to prevent coronavirus infection.
Australia is the one of the first regulators to authorise the use of Remdesivir for treatment following on from recent approvals in European Union, Japan, and Singapore.
Gilead Sciences said data from a late-stage study showed it significantly improved clinical recovery and reduced the risk of death in COVID-19 patients.
The company said it analysed data from 312 patients treated in a late-stage study and a separate real-world retrospective cohort of 818 patients with similar characteristics and disease severity as in the study.
Findings from the analysis showed that 74.4 per cent of remdesivir-treated patients recovered by day 14 versus 59.0 per cent of patients receiving standard of care, the company said.
The mortality rate for patients treated with Remdesivir in the analysis was 7.6 per cent at Day 14, compared with 12.5 per cent among patients not on Remdesivir.
World Health Organization to probe into virus origin in China
An advance team from the World Health Organization (WHO) has left for China to organise an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus which sparked the global pandemic.
The virus is believed to have emerged in a wholesale market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, since then closed, after jumping the species barrier from the animal kingdom to infect humans.
The two WHO experts, specialists in animal health and epidemiology, will work with Chinese scientists to determine the scope and itinerary of the investigation, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said, declining to name them.
“They have gone, they are in the air now, they are the advance party that is to work out the scope,” she told a briefing.
This would involve negotiations on issues including the composition of the fuller team, she added.
“One of the big issues that everybody is interested in, and of course that’s why we’re sending an animal health expert, is to look at whether or not it jumped from species to a human and what species it jumped from,” Ms Harris said.
“We know it’s very, very similar to the virus in the bat, but did it go through an intermediate species? This is a question we all need answered,” she said.
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