Access To Covid-19 Treatments In U.S. To Become Easier

The Biden Administration announced new actions to make Covid-19 treatments even easier to access and to make sure health care providers and patients know about their safety, efficacy, and availability.

Starting this week, the Administration will allow all pharmacy partners in the federal antiviral pharmacy program — tens of thousands of pharmacy locations nationwide — to order free oral antiviral treatments directly from the government.

Currently, oral antivirals are available in about 20,000 locations across the country. This will be nearly doubled in the coming weeks, the White House said.

In addition to the current 2,200 Test-to-Treat sites in pharmacies and other clinical settings, the federal government will work with states and jurisdictions to establish new Test-to-Treat locations with federal support.

The Administration will ramp up its public awareness and education efforts on Covid-19 treatments. It will focus on making sure that people know that Covid-19 oral antiviral treatments must be taken within the first five days of symptom onset and understand their role in reducing the risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19.

The country on Monday recorded 59101 new cases of coronavirus infection and 283 deaths due to the disease. With this, the total number of people infected with the virus in the country has risen to 81,043,362, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

In contrast, the death rate due to the disease remains low and stable. The total Covid casualties in the U.S. reached 991,609.

New York reported the most number of cases – 9778 – while Florida recorded most casualties – 34.

While there is a 32 percent fall in Covid casualties in the last fortnight, 53 percent increase has been recorded in the number of cases in the same period, according to the latest New York Times tally.

Covid hospitalizations are slowly returning to the ascending line.
15639 patients are remaining in the country’s hospitals for treatment for the viral disease.

The number of patients admitted in intensive care units has dropped to 1905.

As per the latest data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 219,370,557 Americans, or 66.1 percent of the eligible population, have been administered both doses of Covid vaccine so far. This includes 90 percent of people above 65.

45.6 percent of the eligible population, or 100,110,420 people, have already received a booster dose that is recommended to provide additional protection from the killer virus.

2412 additional deaths were reported globally on Monday, taking the total number of people who lost their lives due to the pandemic so far to 6,220,980.

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