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Even as this winter’s omicron surge recedes, more than 2,000 people in the U.S. still get hospitalized with COVID-19 each day. This population is largely unvaccinated, with medical conditions that increase their risks. Some of these hospitalizations could have been prevented with early COVID treatments, such as pills and monoclonal antibodies, purchased and distributed for free by the government.
But data on COVID treatment utilization, shared with NPR by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, indicates that millions of COVID treatments are sitting on shelves unused.
“We are still in a public health emergency,” said Dr. Derek Eisnor, who leads the government’s distribution of COVID drugs, on a call with national health organizations on March 16. He urged health leaders to try to get the drugs to communities that have a demand for them, rather than let them go to waste.
“There’s an assumption that there’s not enough of [these drugs] around but it does seem when you look at the numbers that there is a lot around — it’s just not being used,” says Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “They clearly are not getting to people at high enough rates to have their maximum impact.”
Currently, the federal government distributes four outpatient COVID treatments that can help stop the progression of COVID infections if taken within five to seven days of symptom onset, and one prevention therapy for immunocompromised people. State health departments and certain providers can order these drugs, and they are now available at pharmacies, infusion centers and health clinics across the country.
But states and health care providers report that less than half of the supply of treatments that they’ve ordered starting October 2021 has been used.
Health experts initially expected the drugs to fly off the shelves. “I thought [utilization] would be much higher,” says Dr. Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease physician at University of California, San Francisco who serves on the NIH COVID-19 treatment guidelines panel. At first, doctors were prioritizing who would get them, she says, to help preserve access for those with the greatest medical need.
The reported utilization rates may underestimate the total doses used; sites are supposed to report daily or weekly usage numbers to the government, but not all do. Still, the rates are used by the government to make decisions on distribution policies, and Tien says they track with what she’s seeing on the ground.
“When a patient comes to us and they’re COVID positive and