Evaluation of the effectiveness of various drugs in the treatment of COVID-19

In December 2019, the outbreak of a new type of acute viral respiratory disease (pneumonia) was reported in central China and the number of people infected with it increased rapidly. Specialists named the disease COVID-19 and identified its origin as a virus called SARS-CoV-2. So far, no effective drug has been developed that can be used to definitively treat this disease, but some drugs have been identified and introduced that have shown a significant impact on the recovery of patients. In this review study, several published articles on the structure, characteristics, origin and prevalence of COVID-19 virus, as well as drugs used to inhibit COVID-19 virus, were reviewed. All the documents and articles have been collected from reputable sites PubMed, Google scholar, Scopus with keywords such as "COVID-19", "Coronavirus 2019" and "COVID-19 and drugs". Among the drugs studied in this study, lupinavir and ritonavir have been clinically evaluated in many cases along with complementary drugs such as Interferon Alfa, and the results indicate the effectiveness of this drug in reducing the load capacity of the Betacoronaviruses family. Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have been shown to be effective in limiting the replication of COVID-19 in vitro. The antiviral drug amantadine reduces the viruschr('39') replication capacity due to its disruption of the lysosomal pathway. Amantadine, as an anti-influenza drug, prevents the virus from uncoating and releasing its nucleic acid into the respiratory epithelial cells. Remdesivir can also prevent damage to the human lungs caused by coronavirus infection. In relation to favipiravir, studies showed a recovery rate of 91.43%, which indicates a very high effectiveness of this drug. Among the studied drugs, favipiravir and remediator have shown significant effectiveness in many cases and are even recognized and used as COVID-19 effective drug in some countries, so that the efficacy of favipiravir has been reported to be 91.43%. Lupinavir and ritonavir, which have been used in combination with supplements such as Interferon Alpha, as well as hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which reduce the load capacity of the virus, have been shown to be less effective.