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The Documentary: Testing treatments

Testing treatments

27/05/2020 GMT

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Testing treatments

Potential treatments for Covid-19 are trialled on patients

Winifred Robinson hears from doctors and patients taking part in trials of potential Covid-19 treatments.

The way we treat those with Covid-19 looks set to change. Doctors are looking ahead to a time, not too far off, when anyone with early symptoms will be able to drive to a testing centre, get swabbed and an instant result, and then receive a prescription for a combination of effective drugs before the worst of their symptoms take hold. Winifred Robinson hears from doctors and patients, including the first patient in the United Kingdom to take part in one of the new trials.

With the death toll from this pandemic still rising across the world, clinical trials that would have taken years to approve and carry out are being done in weeks. Bradford Royal Infirmary has been recruiting for the United Kingdom-wide Recovery Trial, which involves thousands of patients at 165 hospitals. When 18-year-old Marium Zummer was rushed to hospital with symptoms of Covid-19, doctors feared she might need to be placed on a ventilator. Her father begged for her to be given one of the new treatments, and Winifred follows her progress.

This series comes from a hospital in the North of England, with recordings made by Dr John Wright, who works there. He’s an epidemiologist and has helped the hospital prepare and cope with a huge influx of patients. The hospital layout has been redesigned to try to keep Covid and non-Covid patients apart, but without a testing system that delivers results within hours, it’s proving hard to rule out the risks of infection taking place. This is becoming more of an issue as the hospital increasingly opens up for non-urgent care.

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