Publications - July 2021

Preprint and peer-reviewed publications from RECOVER’s studies
Future pandemic preparedness efforts should focus on building
interdisciplinary collaboration within advisory boards; ensuring transparency in how boards operate;
defining and protecting boundaries of the scientific advisor role; and supporting scientists to inform
the public in the fight against disinformation, whilst dealing with potential hostile reactions.
This study investigates the efficacy of lopinavir-ritonavir and hydroxychloroquine in critically ill patients with COVID-19. Critically ill adults with COVID-19 were randomized to receive lopinavir-ritonavir, hydroxychloroquine, combination therapy of lopinavir-ritonavir and hydroxychloroquine or no antiviral therapy (control). The results show that, among critically ill patients with COVID-19, lopinavir-ritonavir, hydroxychloroquine, or combination therapy worsened outcomes compared to no antiviral therapy.
ISARIC (International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infections Consortium) partnerships and outbreak preparedness initiatives enabled the rapid launch of standardised clinical data collection on COVID-19 in Jan 2020. Extensive global uptake of this resource has resulted in a large, standardised collection of comprehensive clinical data from hundreds of sites across dozens of countries. Data are analysed regularly and reported publicly to inform patient care and public health response. This report, our 15th report, is a part of a series and includes the results of data analysis for data captured before 26 May 2021. The report marks a significant milestone – the submission of clinical data from over half a million individuals hospitalised with COVID-19.
This study describes primary health care (consultation characteristics and management) for patients contacting their general practitioner (GP) with a respiratory tract infection (RTI) early on in the COVID-19 pandemic in contrasting European countries, with comparison to prepandemic findings.
There is potentially considerable variation in the nature and duration of the care provided to hospitalised patients during an ongoing infectious disease epidemic or pandemic. Improvements in care and clinician confidence may shorten the time spent as an inpatient, or the need for admission to an intensive care unit (ICU) or high density unit (HDU), while novel treatment modalities may reduce the time course of illness. On the other hand, limited resources at times of high demand may lead to rationing of resources, with less beneficial consequences. Despite little evidence on how the values of such variables change over the course of a crisis (such as the current COVID-19 pandemic), they may nevertheless be used as proxies for disease severity, outcome measures for clinical trials, and to inform planning and logistics. We hypothesise that variation of this kind has been present over the first year of the pandemic.