How a family's remdesivir hunt reshaped a state Covid-19 response

(MOLLY FERGUSON/STAT)

The U.S. government last month shipped its limited supply of the Gilead drug remdesivir to hospitals around the nation for Covid-19, but that left some places, such as Tennessee, to devise their own strategies for fair distribution. In a new story, STAT's Eric Boodman outlines how, when the leaders at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville realized that they were the only hospital in the state to receive any remdesivir doses, they had to figure out a way to make it more equitable for other hospitals across the state that may need the drug. Their plan, especially when a request for remdesivir came in for a desperately ill patient from eastern Tennessee, took shape with "a few pharmacists, taking impromptu road trips, improvising secure handoffs, frantically trying to fill in the gaps," Eric writes. Read more here.

Here's what else is new with the pandemic:

Two studies published yesterday found that shutdowns around the world likely saved millions of lives: One study found that around 60 million infections in the U.S., and 285 million in China were prevented due to government restrictions. According to the other study, more than 3 million lives in Europe were saved due to lockdown measures there.
A new paper posted to the preprint server medRxiv — and therefore not yet peer-reviewed — finds that Black individuals in the U.S. tended to follow social distancing guidelines more than white people. Social distancing across U.S. populations was also greater during weekends than during weekdays through the month of March, although that trend was revered by early May.
As state and local governments figure out ways to allocate limited supplies of remdesivir to their residents, the authors of a new First Opinion argue that the most disproportionately affected communities ought to be first on the list to get the Covid-19 drug. "[W]hen resources are scarce, as in the case of remdesivir, any inequalities in its distribution must end up benefiting those who are worst off," they write. "Otherwise, the distribution is unfair, unjust."