Tengiz Tsertsvadze, director of the Tbilisi Infectious Diseases Hospital, talks about the effectiveness of the drug Remdesivir in the treatment of coronavirus.
According to him, Remedisivir may not be an ideal drug and it might be replaced by a better drug in the future, but there is no better medicine today and it is used all over the world.
According to Tsertsvadze, treatment with Remdesivir in the patients infected with COVID-19 is recommended by FDA, NIH, IDSA, German Guidelines and etc. Tsertsvadze notes, that the broadly used phrases related to the usage of Remdesivir are “Remdesivir is standard treatment for hospitalized patients requiring oxygen”, “Remdesivir is broadly used”, “we do use Remdesivir for all patients admitted to hospital with need to oxygen”.
“Import of the trial batch of Remdesivir will cost 320 thousand GEL instead of the announced 400 thousand EUR or USD. However, at this price it will be possible to buy a few artificial respirators, and therefore their purchase will not change anything, as the country currently has more than 2000 artificial respirators. They also have a function of “high flow” and in addition, we have the so-called over 500 separate “high flow” (oxygen supply) apparatus, which is quite sufficient even for today’s very large number of COVID patients”, Tsertsvadze declares.
Tengiz Tsersvadze made the statement in the response to those doctors, who criticized him for bringing Remdesivir in Georgia for treatment of COVID-19 patients. Doctors Mrs. Maia Butsashvili, Mr. Giorgi Kamkamidze, Mr. Giorgi Kandelaki, Mrs, Tamar Zhamurashvili, Mr. Zurab Guruli declare that as of WHO, Remdesivir has not shown efficiency in the “Solidarity” research.
