A search in the surge of treatment for COVID-19 patients: A narrative literature review

Abstract

Today, our understanding towards COVID-19 pandemic is that it is contagious and based on the behaviour of the virus, the signs and symptoms of this viral resemble the viral infection  like Severe Acute-Respiratory  Syndrome-coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV). Currently, documented vaccines or drugs are not available for the treatment of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. The main objective of this article is to compile the available literature on the treatment modalities for COVID-19, currently being advocated. Furthermore, there is no time to wait for evidence-based treatment, hence in such a scenario; an attempt has been made to collect the available scientific literature and understand the treatment of the disease with this insight. A MEDLINE-PUBMED search was performed in the surge of the treatment strategies for COVID-19 using the keywords "COVID-19", "nCoV", "novel coronavirus", "treatment of coronavirus" and "therapies". We have reviewed the multiple articles from recently published literature and various pre-print proofs from up-to-date journals. Based on the reviewed literature, various categories of drugs are under trial or have been tried for the treatment of nCoV infection, which are categorised as medications (anti-viral agents, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, ACE-2 inhibitors, etc.), immune therapy, traditional Chinese medicine, plasma exchange therapy, and blood purification therapy, etc. We attempted to go through the literature available for the treatment of COVID-19 and tried to compile it all together. Still, clinical trials are under process, and there are no evidence-based treatment strategies available to manage the cases of COVID-19 patients.