Remdesivir, a long-awaited drug, arrived this morning from the US to the General University Hospital (VFN) and the 1st Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague. It is already being given to a patient with severe Covid-19 disease. Men have failed due to lung disease and are linked to extracorporeal circulation ECMO. The medicine will be given for ten days.

“Remdesivir came from the United States to our hospital this morning, via DHL from Basel's warehouse. A critical patient with severe Covid-19 disease was given by our doctors immediately and will continue to do so in the days to come. The hospitalized man is still in a very serious condition. I would like to point out that Remdesivir is an experiment. We do not have any studies to prove that it will miraculously help people with coronavir. Of course we all want it, ” said the director of VFN David Feltl. Remdesivir is an antiviral medicine originally intended for the treatment of infected ebola bleeding fever in Congo. In the past, SARS and MERS caused by a similar type of coronavirus have also been studied.

The patient is hospitalized at the Department of Anaesthesiology, Resuscitation and Intensive Medicine of the General Teaching Hospital and the First Faculty of Medicine (KARIM). He is in very serious condition. The men who worked as a cab driver failed due to Covid-19 lung disease. Normal lung ventilation was not enough. Doctors had to connect it to the ECMO extracorporeal circulation, which supplies oxygen to the blood. “This is a very complicated patient who is on artificial lung ventilation and has had a tracheostomy. It is a condition where new complications may arise with prolonged treatment. However, it is now stabilized. At Remdesivir, we will give the patient 10 days of treatment. We will give him a 30-minute intravenous infusion once a day. We have no experience with the medicine and should be taken with caution. It may or may not help. I can hardly say that we will win, ” said the head physician of intensive care KARIM VFN and 1. LF UK doc. MUDr. Martin Balík, Ph.D., EDIC, who is also a treating physician of a critical patient.