Treatments scenario of COVID-19 in Bangladesh
So far, 91,229 patients are currently under treatment in different medical institutes, and 43,007 patients were placed in isolation units as of July 20, 2020. Currently, the country has 629 institutional quarantine centers that can accommodate 31,991 patients across 64 districts, and as of 20 July 23,331 individuals were gone under institutional quarantine and of them, 17,406 have got release while 335,643 out of 389,150 individuals have been released from home quarantine [53]. Different antiviral drugs and treatment strategies have been implemented to treat COVID-19 patients. DGHS recommended controversial drugs such as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for the treatment in the ”National Guidelines on Clinical Management of Coronavirus Disease-2019” [57]. A medical team from Bangladesh Medical College Hospital claimed that a combination of antiprotozoal medicine Ivermectin and antibiotic Doxycycline was effective for the treatment of 60 COVID-19 patients [58]. Clinical trials are going on and until now 400-500 COVID-19 patients have received the drugs, of them almost 98% of patients had recovered within 4-14 days [59]. Bangladesh based Beximco Pharmaceuticals had launched the world’s first generic Remdesivir-an antiviral drug for the treatment of COVID-19 patients on 21 May 2020 [60]. In a recent clinical trial, it has demonstrated potential effectivity against SARS-CoV-2 and lessened the recovery time [61]. Remdesivir which works by inhibiting the replication of SARS-CoV-2 has now become the talk of the town and recently received “Emergency Use Authorisation” from the FDA and developed by Gilead Sciences [62]. Bangladeshi based pharmaceutical Globe Biotech Limited has announced on 1st July 2020 that they are developing a COVID-19 vaccine which showed effectivity on preliminary trials on animal models [63]. They have also developed a guideline for clinical trials which will be conducted after getting approval from the Bangladesh Medical Research Council (BMRC) and claimed to produce the vaccine within six months after clinical trials. The research group of 12 scientists analyzed 5743 genome sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 from the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) through the bioinformatics approach and conducted the test through the Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) method to detect molecular interactions [64, 65]. The BMRC has recently approved the phase-III clinical trials of a candidate vaccine developed by Sinovac Research and Development Co Ltd, China in Bangladesh. The trials will involve 4200 volunteers at seven different hospitals and will begin in the early of August this year under the supervision of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) [66, 67]. The country has recently started clinical trials of convalescent plasma therapy (CPT) and received ethical approval from DGDA and the BMRC. 18 patients were administered plasma from recovered patients and the government in collaboration with several national organization has recently inaugurated a plasma network namely ‘Shohojoddha” to consolidate plasma therapy across the country [68, 69].