Introduction
In late (December) 2019 a new pneumonia with unknown origin, detected in patients who were linked to a seafood wholesale market, where wild animals were illegally sold in china. After testing the specimens of the patient’s airway epithelial cells, a novel coronavirus was detected and described as 2019-nCov, and was later named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) by WHO, and the disease caused by this new virus, was named Covid-19 (Zhu et al., 2020).
This new virus is the seventh human coronavirus described to date as being responsible for respiratory infections (Devaux, Rolain, Colson, & Raoult, 2020), and categorized in the Betacoronaviruse subgroup(Zhu et al., 2020).
Covid-19 rapidly spread in the world and made an unprecedented pandemic on March 12, 2020, became a big concern for global health with threatening public health over the world. Thus there was an urgent need for an effective treatment and conducting clinical trials and studies for assessing the efficacy of different repurposed drugs for treatment and prevention of transmission of this infection (Kupferschmidt & Cohen, 2020). So WHO considered a Solidarity and a major study, on March 20, 2020 to collect scientific data and compare therapeutic strategies for defining an effective treatment for patients with Covid-19, wants the hospitals overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients to participate, and from the physicians to simply record their results as the duration of hospital stay, whether the patients required intensive care unit (ICU) admission or ventilation and the day patient left the hospital or died. ”That’s all” says Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, a medical officer at WHO’s Emergencies Programme (Kupferschmidt & Cohen, 2020).
There for we decided to do our duty in this Solidarity and describe the result of our therapeutic regimens in this hospital, as a center for Covid-19 patients.
Antiviral drugs, may be the best candidates for the treatment of Covid-19, until we have specific therapeutic drugs (Kivrak, Ulaş, & Kivrak, 2021). Oseltamivir (brand name Tamiflu) is a neuraminidase inhibitor that is approved for treatment and prophylaxis of influenza A and B ((Yousefi, Mashouri, Okpechi, Alahari, & Alahari, 2021),(Agrawal, Goel, & Gupta, 2020)).It can inhibit the spread of the influenza virus and reduce viral shedding in respiratory secretions in the human body (Agrawal et al., 2020), and is considered as a therapeutic option in several clinical trials and studies but the results remain controversial ((Zhou et al., 2020),(Ungogo, Mohammed, Umar, Bala, & Khalid, 2021)). There for further studies are required to demonstrate the efficacy of antiviral drugs for the treatment of Covid-19 patients.
In this study we aimed to evaluate the efficacy of Oseltamivir, by comparing two different combination therapeutic regimens, based on length of hospital stay, need for ICU admission, mechanical ventialation and mortality rate.