According to “Ö1”, around 240,000 therapy cycles of the two oral drugs “Paxlovid” and “Lagevrio” have been delivered to Austria and only just under a fifth of them have been prescribed to patients – primarily in Vienna and Lower Austria. Katharina Reich, Chief Medical Officer in the Ministry of Health, confirmed that there was “room for improvement” and that “further educational work had to be carried out”. “There still seems to be no lack of information,” said the chair of the Gecko task force and the Corona Commission. In any case, one works closely with the pharmacist and medical association.
The two medications are administered in tablet form and can be given to high-risk patients via their general practitioner. They prevent the coronavirus from multiplying in the body and must be taken at the beginning of the infection if possible. If they are taken quickly after a positive test, they reduce the risk of a severe course of the disease by up to 90 percent. Especially for risk groups, these drugs provide additional protection against a severe course of the disease with Covid-19 and a hospital stay.
A call to the doctor is enough, the medicine can be picked up
After a positive antigen or PCR test, a call to the family doctor is often sufficient. The medication can then be picked up directly from the pharmacy. In Vienna, the Vienna Health Service (MA 15) proactively contacts risk groups, interactions with other medicines are also clarified and, if corona medicines are prescribed, these are delivered directly to the patient by bicycle messenger. In the omicron variant, the symptoms are “not as pronounced,” said Arshang Valipour, head of the Department of Internal Medicine and Pneumology at the Floridsdorf Clinic and head of the Karl Landsteiner Institute for Lung Research and Pneumological Oncology in the “Ö1” interview.
Risk groups should use medication
However, it is a fallacy that processes are not that difficult. It would be “nevertheless important that people at risk use these drugs”. Only recently did the doctor’s parents take the medication after positive corona tests. The “tolerability and safety is given and also good protection,” said Valipour.
Source: Nachrichten
