Abstract
A new coronavirus was identified as the cause of disease outbreak that originated from China. The virus is now known as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 2019-nCov HCoV-19) and the disease is called Covid-19. There is no effective treatment for this disease; However, a few treatments such as favipiravir and remdesivir show some promising outcomes. Therefore, we conducted this study in order to evaluate the effectiveness of these drugs in reducing the length of hospital stay. Two groups of patients were studied at the Al-Mawani Hospital to investigate the effect of two different treatments in reducing the duration of hospitalization. A group received remdesivir (N=27) and the other one received favipiravir (N=19), in addition to the control (N=29). This is a randomized controlled trial that has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of remdesivir and favipiravir in reducing the hospital stay of Covid-19 patients. Length of hospital stay was measured in days. We found that both remdesivir and favipiravir are effective in reducing the length of stay of Covid-19 patients in hospital in comparison to the control, with more effectiveness for favipiravir than remdesivir. In addition to its efficacy against Covid-19, favipiravir has many advantages such as oral administration and low cost that made it more favorable to treat Covid-19, unlike remdesivir. More studies are warranted to reveal the most effective of the two treatments in terms of safety, use, and efficacy via including higher number of patients.
Keywords: Favipravir, Remdesivir, Hospital stay, Covid-19
