After A Year Battling COVID-19, Drug Treatments Get A Mixed Report Card

Drugs to treat COVID-19 are being fast-tracked for development, but the pace can't match the astonishing speed that gave birth to the vaccines.

But one year into the pandemic, there has been strong progress toward effective drug treatments, and the groundwork has been laid for drugs to kill the virus and arrest disease.

If you want to see a scorecard on COVID-19 drugs, you can check out two good sources. Expert panels are constantly updating treatment guidelines for both the National Institutes of Health and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Potential drugs are sorted into three basic categories: They work, they don't work, or there simply isn't enough information to know.

"When these panels first started, essentially all the drugs were in that category that we don't have enough information," says Raj Gandhi, an infectious diseases doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, who is on both of those committees. When the first guidelines came out, that ambivalent answer "was true of just about every drug that was being talked about."