Page 35 - COVID-19-Mortality-review-in-Malaysia-and-updates-on-clinical-management-of-COVID-19

Treatment with Favipiravir

Favipiravir is available in Malaysia currently, but not available in many of the Western
countries. This was a before and after study comparing Favipiravir with lopinavir-

ritonavir [8]. They looked at the positive rate. It showed that favipiravir compared to
Kaletra was a better antiviral as far as bringing down/making the nasopharyngeal

swabs negative is concerned. It brought it down faster.

Diagram 17: Study by Cai et al. comparing Favipiravir and Kaletra in an open-label
control study

This was translated into better chest CT scan results. The CT scan improvement
also was higher in the favipiravir group compared to the kaletra group. The patients in
the study arm were mild cases and none of them had passed away or on ventilators.

That was why we were not able to look at the mortality rates.