American Thoracic Society Releases Interim Guidance on Treatment of COVID-19, Including Discussion of Controversial Hydroxychloroquine Therapy

The American Thoracic Society (ATS) on April 3, 2020 published a guidance document providing several suggestions for treatment of COVID-19.  The document, entitled “COVID‐19: Interim Guidance on Management Pending Empirical Evidence,” was developed by an ATS-led international task force and addresses several recently publicized potential treatment regimens.  While the document explicitly does not constitute ATS’s official position on treatment of COVID-19 infections, the authors explain that it is intended to provide “interim guidance for therapeutic interventions to frontline clinicians, based upon scarce direct evidence, indirect evidence, and clinical observations and experiences of clinicians around the world who have battled COVID-19.”  The document’s “suggestions” were developed based on the survey responses of 80 clinicians who have been involved in treatment of COVID-19 around the world.

The guidance document addresses a number of potential therapeutic interventions as well as the circumstances and parameters under which those interventions may or may not be recommended for use.  The authors point toward the need to gather significantly more data on the proposed treatments, but acknowledge that, given the urgent need to find effective treatments for severe COVID-19 infections, providers will likely need to administer unproven treatments before results from clinical trials are available.  To further assist with assessing the efficacy and safety of various treatments, the authors call for the collection of data from patients who receive these interventions outside the context of clinical trials.  Ideally, such data would include detailed information about patient characteristics; the interventions administered; and the outcomes of the attempted treatments, including mortality, ICU length of stay, hospital length of stay, intubation rate, length of mechanical ventilation, need for long‐term oxygen therapy, and adverse events.
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