February 22, 2024 – The risk of being hospitalized for COVID-19 was reduced by 84% in individuals who took paxlovid, a brand new study reports.
This medicine has been approved within the United States to be used in people over 12 years of age who're liable to severe COVID-19 infection.
The study was published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.
The study authors examined the health records of nearly 45,000 outpatients who tested positive for COVID-19 from January to August 2022. During this sampling period, the Omicron strain was dominant.
The mean age of patients was 47 years, with 62% white, 24% black, 6% Hispanic, and eight% of unknown ethnicity. A slight majority, 51%, had received two or more doses of the vaccine before the study period.
From the study group, 201 people were hospitalized inside 28 days of their positive COVID test.
Almost 5,000 people within the study group received Paxlovid. Paxlovid use was the most effective predictor of hospitalization avoidance, with three of those people being hospitalized.
“Patients treated with paxlovid were twice as likely to have received at least two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine,” University of Minnesota CIDRAP reported. “They were also more likely to be 70 years old or older.”
People who took Paxlovid were more more likely to be white and live in middle- or upper-income areas.
“The risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 was reduced by 84% [Paxlovid] Recipients in a large, diverse healthcare system during the Omicron wave,” the study authors write. “These results suggest that [Paxlovid] remained highly effective in a setting that was substantially different from the original clinical trials.”