Early results from a study led by Scripps Research and eMed digital medicine have discovered a surprisingly high amount of people catching COVID-19 again, even if they got treated with the antiviral Paxlovid.
“COVID rebound”, which is when someone gets rid of the virus then catches it all over again later, is appearing frequently -no matter if the person has taken Paxlovid or not.
Recently, scientists released some results in a medical journal called Clinical Infectious Diseases. The information was collected from people who purchased SARS-CoV-2 antigen test kits online. They looked at 170 customers and noticed that 9.3% of those who didn’t take antiviral medicine had their virus return and 7% reported symptoms of COVID-19 back after it disappeared, but for the ones that did take Paxlovid, 14.2% saw the virus come back and 18.9% got sick again with COVID-19 symptoms afterwards.
More people in the Paxlovid-treated group said they got COVID-19 again, but it wasn’t a big enough difference to really be noticed. This study is going to follow 800 people altogether.
A study found that when people recover from the COVID-19 virus, they sometimes have to deal with the virus again. This is known as a “rebound” situation. The lead researcher of the study, Jay Pandit, said that more people need to be studied in order to understand it better.
Last year, a team of scientists did some research together called the eMed study. Famous epidemiologist Michael Mina was part of this group, and they worked on the Test-to-Treat company’s program to help with treating COVID-19 using at-home tests.
In 2022, medical people started to get reports of COVID-19 coming back. Researchers don’t know why this happened but some believe it’s because some patients were given a special combination of two medicines (called “Paxlovid”) which was approved for use by the US government in late 2021 for those who had mild or moderate COVID-19 and were likely to become seriously ill.
To try and figure out if there is any connection between the “rebound” phenomenon and Paxlovid, Pandit and his friends have joined forces with a company called eMed to conduct an experiment in the real world. They will be testing people using COVID-19 Test-to-Treat antigen test kits combined with telehealth supervisory tasks, as well as telemedicine services.
Dr. Mina says that it’s really important to get treatments for COVID-19 so that people can get better quickly and help reduce bad outcomes from the disease. To figure out if treatments are working, they’re doing a study with the Scripps Research Translation Institute which will help them know what treatments work or not. People involved in this study also think it is cool because it shows how much good you can do with industry partners to research and improve public health!
The researchers asked people who tested positive for the virus to join their study. If they agreed, the researchers sent them additional test kits, and asked them to do a new test and answer questions about their symptoms every other day for 16 days. Then, they compared those who took Paxlovid medication and those who didn’t to see if the virus came back or not. In this preliminary analysis, 127 people received the medicine while 43 didn’t.
People who were part of the Paxlovid group had more rebounds (14.2%) compared to those who did an antigen test (9.3%). The same goes for symptom rebounds—Paxlovid group experienced slightly higher at 18.9%, while people with antigen test only had 7%. However, these numbers aren’t much different so it can’t be said that one example was better than another. When it comes to things like how long it takes for someone to go from positive results to negative or how fast a symptom resolves, both groups were pretty much the same. Age, gender and pre-existing conditions didn’t matter either.
Pandit explains that their research needs more people (up to 800) before it can get conclusive results. However, they already know that both groups in the trial, treated and untreated, are doing better than similar experiments done before. For example, Pfizer’s study of Paxlovid only had a 2% rate of return within two weeks between the Paxlovid and placebo forms.
Pandit and team are getting more people involved in their study. Along with that, they will sequence the virus found in participants, plus analyze their blood samples to check antibody levels & immune markers. They want to know why the virus can come back (rebound phenomenon) and if it’s because of Paxlovid, how much its related to the virus variant, & how our immune system plays a part.
He and his team also want to make sure that people of all different races and ethnicities have an equal chance of getting the Paxlovid treatment. In the first group of 170, there were more White people than Black and Latino people who signed up for the treatment.
Scientists did a study, published by the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, to measure the virus and symptom rebound differences between people receiving medication – Nirmatrelvir Plus Ritonavir – and those who didn’t. The study was written by Jay Pandit, Jennifer Radin, Danielle Chang, Emily Spencer, Jeff Pawelek, Mira Diwan, Leila Roumani and Michael Mina in February 2023.
Financial help was given to our study by eMed, a health institute called the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and another research center known as the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
