In regards to the most recent crisis of COVID-19, East Florida Eye Institute is taking all of the necessary precautions and following the CDC guidelines to remain open to serve you. We will continue to see our patients while keeping them as safe as possible. Our staff is following all the guidelines to ensure your safety. We want to do our part to help manage the spread of COVID-19, so we kindly ask if you have to be accompanied by a guest, please have them stay in their car during the duration of your appointment. Please check back for frequent updates and call us for any further questions or concerns. Stay safe!
Yes, you need to wear some sort of a mask. If you can’t find one you can make one out of cloth or a T shirt.
When people recover from COVID-19, their blood contains antibodies that their bodies produced to fight the coronavirus and help them get well. Antibodies are found in plasma, a component of blood. Convalescent plasma — literally plasma from recovered patients — has been used for more than 100 years to treat a variety of illnesses from measles to polio, chickenpox, and SARS. In the current situation, antibody-containing plasma from a recovered patient is given by transfusion to a patient who is suffering from COVID-19. The donor antibodies help the patient fight the illness, possibly shortening the length or reducing the severity of the disease.
Though convalescent plasma has been used for many years, and with varying success, not much is known about how effective it is for treating COVID-19. There have been reports of success from China, but no randomized, controlled studies (the gold standard for research studies) have been done. Experts also don’t yet know the best time during the course of the illness to give plasma. However, on March 24th, the FDA began allowing convalescent plasma to be used in patients with serious or immediately life-threatening COVID-19 infections. This treatment is still considered experimental.
In order to donate plasma, a person must meet several criteria. They have to have tested positive for COVID-19, recovered, have no symptoms for 14 days, currently test negative for COVID-19, and have high enough antibody levels in their plasma. A donor and patient must also have compatible blood types. Once plasma is donated, it is screened for other infectious diseases, such as HIV. Each donor produces enough plasma to treat one to three patients. Donating plasma should not weaken the donor’s immune system nor make the donor more susceptible to getting reinfected with the virus.
Some critically ill patients with COVID-19 have been treated with high doses of intravenous (IV) vitamin C in the hope that it will hasten recovery. However, there is no clear or convincing scientific evidence that it works for COVID-19 infections, and it is not a standard part of treatment for this new infection. A study is underway in China to determine if this treatment is useful for patients with severe COVID-19; results are expected in the fall.
The idea that high-dose IV vitamin C might help in overwhelming infections is not new. A 2017 study found that high-dose IV vitamin C treatment (along with thiamine and corticosteroids) appeared to prevent deaths among people with sepsis, a form of overwhelming infection causing dangerously low blood pressure and organ failure. Another study published last year assessed the effect of high-dose vitamin C infusions among patients with severe infections who had sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), in which the lungs fill with fluid. While the study’s main measures of improvement did not improve within the first four days of vitamin C therapy, there was a lower death rate at 28 days among treated patients. Though neither of these studies looked at vitamin C use in patients with COVID-19, the vitamin therapy was specifically given for sepsis and ARDS, and these are the most common conditions leading to intensive care unit admission, ventilator support, or death among those with severe COVID-19 infections.
Regarding prevention, there is no evidence that taking vitamin C will help prevent infection with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. While standard doses of vitamin C are generally harmless, high doses can cause a number of side effects, including nausea, cramps, and an increased risk of kidney stones.
Scientists all over the world are testing whether drugs previously developed to treat other viral infections might also be effective against the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19. One drug that has received a lot of attention is the antiviral drug remdesivir. That’s because the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is similar to the coronaviruses that caused the diseases SARS and MERS — and evidence from laboratory and animal studies suggests that remdesivir may help limit the reproduction and spread of these viruses in the body. In particular, there is a critical part of all three viruses that can be targeted by drugs. That critical part, which makes an important enzyme that the virus needs to reproduce, is virtually identical in all three coronaviruses; drugs like remdesivir that successfully hit that target in the viruses that cause SARS and MERS are likely to work against the COVID-19 virus.
Remdesivir was developed to treat several other severe viral diseases, including the disease caused by Ebola virus (not a coronavirus). It works by inhibiting the ability of the coronavirus to reproduce and make copies of itself: if it can’t reproduce, it can’t make copies that spread and infect other cells and other parts of the body. Remdesivir inhibited the ability of the coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS to infect cells in a laboratory dish. The drug also was effective in treating these coronaviruses in animals: there was a reduction in the amount of virus in the body, and also an improvement in lung disease caused by the virus.
The drug appears to be effective in the laboratory dish, in protecting cells against infection by the COVID virus (as is true of the SARS and MERS coronaviruses), but more studies are underway to confirm that this is true. Remdesivir was used in the first case of COVID-19 that occurred in Washington state, in January 2020. The patient was severely ill, but survived. Of course, experience in one patient does not prove the drug is effective.
Two large randomized clinical trials are underway in China. The two trials will enroll over 700 patients, and are likely to definitively answer the question of whether the drug is effective in treating COVID-19. The results of those studies are expected in April or May 2020. Studies also are underway in the United States, including at several Harvard-affiliated hospitals. It is hard to predict when the drug could be approved for use and produced in large amounts, assuming the clinical trials indicate that it is effective and safe.
Increasing evidence suggests that a lost sense of smell, known medically as anosmia, may be a symptom of COVID-19. This is not surprising, because viral infections are a leading cause of loss of sense of smell, and COVID-19 is a caused by a virus. Still, loss of smell might help doctors identify people who do not have other symptoms, but who might be infected with the COVID-19 virus — and who might be unwittingly infecting others.
A statement written by a group of ear, nose and throat specialists (otolaryngologists) in the United Kingdom reported that in Germany, two out of three confirmed COVID-19 cases had a loss of sense of smell; in South Korea, 30% of people with mild symptoms who tested positive for COVID-19 reported anosmia as their main symptom. On March 22nd, the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery recommended that anosmia be added to the list of COVID-19 symptoms used to screen people for possible testing or self-isolation.
In addition to COVID-19, loss of smell can also result from allergies as well as other viruses, including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold. So anosmia alone does not mean you have COVID-19. Studies are being done to get more definitive answers about how common anosmia is in people with COVID-19, at what point after infection loss of smell occurs, and how to distinguish loss of smell caused by COVID-19 from loss of smell caused by allergies, other viruses, or other causes altogether.
Until we know more, tell your doctor right away if you find yourself newly unable to smell. He or she may prompt you to get tested and to self-isolate.
Recently, there has been considerable discussion of whether two related drugs — chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — that have been available for decades to treat other illnesses might also be effective in treating COVID-19. The drugs are primarily used to treat malaria and several inflammatory diseases, including systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus) and rheumatoid arthritis. No drug is perfectly safe, but these drugs are quite safe when used for just the several days they might be needed to treat COVID-19. They are also cheap, already available at our local drug stores, and relatively free of side effects.
The question, of course, is whether they are effective against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Are they effective in killing the virus in a laboratory dish? And are they effective in killing the virus in people? If the answer to the first question is “no,” there’s no point in getting an answer to the second question.
There is strong evidence that both drugs kill the COVID-19 virus in the laboratory dish. The drugs appear to work through two mechanisms. First, they make it harder for the virus to attach itself to the cell, inhibiting the virus from entering the cell and multiplying within it. Second, if the virus does manage to get inside the cell, the drugs kill it before it can multiply.
One report, published in February 2020, claimed that chloroquine had been used in more than 100 patients in China who had COVID-19. The scientists stated that their results demonstrated that chloroquine is superior to the control treatment in inhibiting the worsening of pneumonia, improving lung imaging findings, eliminating the virus from the body, and shortening the duration of the disease.
These claims are exciting. However, the report provided virtually no evidence in support of the claims. First of all, this was not a randomized, double-blind controlled trial, the gold standard for research studies. Second, no evidence was presented as to how severe the pneumonia was, nor whether findings on lung x-rays or CT scans really improved. Third, although they claim the drug made the virus disappear, they didn’t report what the levels of the virus were before versus after the treatment. In short, not much evidence.
Another small study was conducted by a group of scientists in southern France, a region hard hit by COVID-19. This, also, was not a randomized trial. Instead, the scientists compared 26 patients who received hydroxychloroquine to 16 who did not: after six days, the virus was gone from the body in 70% of those given the treatment, compared to only 12.5% of those who weren’t. The drug appeared to be as effective in the sickest patients as in the least sick, but the study was too small to be sure about that. The study also was too small to say that people who received the treatment were protected against a prolonged illness or death.