Doctors can better handle common and serious complications like blood clots. They realized that patients do better if they aren’t lying on their backs all the time. Patients in Emory hospitals are encouraged to spend some time lying on their stomachs. That simple effort sometimes is enough to keep them out of the intensive-care unit…

And while no medicine can cure COVID-19, a series of studies showed that steroids can benefit the sickest patients.

Emory, like many medical centers, had not been using steroids such as dexamethasone routinely to treat COVID-19 until a major study from the United Kingdom showed that these drugs reduce the risk of death among seriously ill patients.

“So that’s a tremendous success story,” Coopersmith says. “In just a few months we have a drug which is easily available everywhere and quite cheap, and which improves survival significantly in the ICU patient population.”