Hospitals short on remdesivir should do lottery for who gets coronavirus drug, CA says

After shipments of the coronavirus drug remdesivir went out to states this week, California suggested that its hospitals can use a “lottery system” to determine who gets the treatment if the drug becomes scarce.

California’s Department of Public Health issued a guidance on Tuesday on how to allocate remdesivir for COVID-19 patients.

The federal government sent CDPH enough of the drug for 100 to 200 patients but California has more than 3,000 people hospitalized for COVID-19, CNN reported.

CDPH recommended that a “prioritization” committee be created and comprised of representatives from “pharmacy, hospital medicine, critical care, nursing, administration, and if available, infectious disease and ethics.”

If enough of the drug isn’t available to treat eligible patients, hospitals can use “a lottery system to select a certain proportion of patients who become eligible for the drug,” CDPH wrote.

Remdesivir was given emergency FDA approval on May 1 to treat severe COVID-19 illness in children and adults.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said in April that remdesivir had a “clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.”

“What it has proven is that a drug can block this virus,” Fauci said, according to the Associated Press. “This will be the standard of care.”

The antiviral drug reduced recovery time by about 30%, from 15 days to 11 days, in a study by the National Institute of Health of more than 1,000 patients, according to the AP.

During the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals have already been faced with making difficult decisions about which patients should get ventilators when there’s a shortage.

“The prioritization of patients in the face of not enough ventilators — there’s no perfect answer. There are only bad options, and the goal is to choose the least bad option,” Douglas White, the University of Pittsburgh’s chair for ethics in critical care medicine, told Stat News.

This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 4:31 PM with the headline "Hospitals short on remdesivir should do lottery for who gets coronavirus drug, CA says."