COVID-19 Algorithm Treatment at Home

The newly recognised disease COVID-19 is caused by the Severe-Acute-Respiratory-Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which rapidly spread globally in late 2019, reaching pandemic proportions. The clinical spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 infection is broad, encompassing asymptomatic infection, mild upper respiratory tract illness and mild extrapulmonary symptoms, and severe viral pneumonia with respiratory failure and even death.

For COVID-19, most primary care physicians have initially treated their patients at home according to their judgment, with various treatment regimens they believe are most appropriate based on their experience/expertise. We recently published a note on how we were treating patients at home based on the pathophysiology underlining the mild/moderate symptoms at the onset of the illness and the proposal of simple drugs that theoretically better fit these mechanisms.

Because the common early mild symptoms of COVID-19 highlight a systemic inflammatory process, there is the recommendation of using anti-inflammatory agents to limit excessive host inflammatory responses to the viral infection, including non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and corticosteroids. Moreover, COVID-19 patients are exposed to the risk of thromboembolic events and anticoagulant prophylaxis is recommended even at home, in particular settings, unless contraindicated.

In an academic matched-cohort study, we found that early treatment of COVID-19 patients at home by their family doctors according to the proposed recommendation regimen almost completely prevented the need for hospital admission (the most clinically relevant outcome of the study along with death) due to progression toward more severe illness (2 out of 90 patients), compared to patients in the 'control' cohort who were treated at home according to their family physician's assessments (13 out of 90 patients). However, the rate of hospitalization was a secondary outcome of the study and the possibility of a casual finding cannot be definitely excluded. Moreover, these findings were achieved in a retrospective observational study with two matched cohorts of COVID-19 patients, a possible additional limitation of the robustness of the conclusions that would deserve further validation. Thus, we have considered the observed reduction in patient hospitalization a hypothesis generating finding to be confirmed.

In this pragmatic, prospective, three-months, cluster randomized, open-label, blinded endpoint (PROBE) clinical trial, we will compare two groups of family doctors according to a randomized approach, who will treat their COVID19-patients with the proposed recommendation algorithm or other treatment regimens they normally feel appropriate according to their usual clinical practice, and monitor them longitudinally up to 3 months.

Our working hypothesis is that following the proposed recommendation algorithm the early COVID-19-related inflammatory process is limited, preventing the need of hospital admission at larger extent than with other therapeutic approaches also targeting early symptoms of the illness at home.

Should the findings be confirmed, the tested standardized treatment protocol would achieve major benefits for patients with early COVID-19 in particular in relation to a remarkably reduced risk of hospitalization that is expected to translate into reduced morbility and, possibly, mortality. Notably, these expected clinical benefits would be associated with remarkably reduced treatment costs related to reduced hospitalization.