Treatment for COVID is better than a year ago, but still has a long way to go

Though treatment for the sickest patients has improved since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic a year ago, roughly 20% of patients sick enough to be hospitalized still end up in intensive care – a figure that hasn’t changed in the past year, said Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the research arm of Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider.

And death rates remain concerningly high in ICUs, he said…

Health workers aren’t “throwing the kitchen sink” at patients anymore. They use ventilators more judiciously, finding that delivering oxygen to the throat rather than forcing air into the lungs with a ventilator can be safer and more effective for all but sickest patients. And doctors have one good tool to prevent death – the steroid dexamethasone – which is cheap, effective and easy to use.