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].