Two previous antibody treatments kept many COVID patients out of the hospital, but they are ineffective against omicron.
monoclonal antibody therapeutics — 2,544 of them were sotrovimab, the sixth-highest amount sent to any state, according to the HHS website.
Some health officials describe the simultaneous surge in omicron infections and the ineffectiveness of monoclonal antibody treatments they had come to rely on as a double gut-punch. “We’ve been maintaining our volume,” he said. “We’re trying to decrease mortality and trying to keep these patients from coming to the hospitals.”
“That’s what makes it very challenging,” Toile said. “We had difficulty because we don’t really have the means to really identify individual patients [to know] which variants they may have, so we don’t have the capability of saying, ‘Use this drug vs. another drug’ for each individual patient.” Hospital officials expressed hope that the antiviral pills, which received federal emergency use authorization late last year, will help in keeping high-risk people from getting severely ill and requiring hospitalization. Both have proven effective against omicron.