'It's time to adopt the failure playbook to end the COVID-19 pandemic,' writes Dan Werb (dmwerb). 'Biden's 'Test to Treat' strategy is a good start'
COVID-19 antivirals, target regions of SARS-CoV-2 critical to its ability to copy itself. At their most effective, they nullify the virus’s basic programming feature: replication. Instead of an elegant entity made up of macromolecules spring-loaded to enter cells, unfurl, and produce progeny ad nauseam, the antivirals make sure that the viruses that enter human hosts are the last of their kind.
The ‘Test to Treat’ plan is part of a larger containment strategy in which the role of COVID-19 antivirals is only going to become more critical. With ‘Test to Treat’, the Biden administration is looking to rapidly increase access to antivirals for people who test positive for infection at pharmacies. It’s a smart approach to reducing illness and death from COVID-19, and it may also set the stage for the end of this pandemic.
Maintaining a supply of effective antivirals could allow them to be deployed strategically when outbreaks of new variants occur. That way, frontline healthcare workers, along with the families and close contacts of infected people, can be given doses to protect them from severe infections even before they’re infected, stamping out the next wave before it starts.
halted additional COVID-19 funding, causing the White House to announce that it would soon have to stop covering the costs of testing, vaccines, and antivirals and other treatments for uninsured people.That’s shortsighted thinking, because what’s perhaps most impressive about the failure playbook is that it might just spell the end ofcoronavirus pandemics, now and forever.
And that’s where the failure playbook, starting with Test and Treat, becomes truly great news for our species’s long conflict with coronaviruses. Regardless of whatever pathogenic coronavirus next emerges, it will also have those same genomic regions as the ones that came before, making it just as susceptible to the antiviral treatments developed to stop SARS-CoV-2. That should help blunt our understandable anxiety about a repeat of the last two years.