1. INTRODUCTION
Since December 2019, a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome
coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection has been causing a pandemic
pneumonia named COVID-19. Infection started in Wuhan, the largest city
of Hubei Chinese province, and rapidly spread throughout the world.
SARS‐CoV‐2 is a coronavirus belonging to the β‐coronavirus cluster,
which includes MERS‐CoV, the causative agent of Middle East respiratory
syndrome (MERS). The mortality rate of COVID-19 has been reported to
range from 3.4% (WHO) up to 14% (Wu et al, 2020) depending on
different authors and modalities of data collection.
The unstoppable COVID-19 has forced countries to develop new strategies
to ensure both constant monitoring of the epidemic and an active
response in terms of reorganization of intensive care (Remuzzi et al,
2020) and to discover possible experimental drug therapies (fig. 1). In
this way, many authors are sharing clinical experience using different
pharmacological approaches, already on the market, in COVID-19 patients.
A brief summary of pharmacological therapies currently under
investigation is reported in table 1.