Covid-19 treatments are widely available to at-risk New Yorkers, but many who could benefit from them may not even be aware they exist.

One of these treatments, an antiviral medication called Paxlovid, is particularly effective, said Dr. Ted Long, the head of New York City’s Test and Trace Corps, a city program that provides free testing and support to New Yorkers with Covid-19.

“For every 20 New Yorkers that we treat with Paxlovid, we prevent one New Yorker from getting so sick that they would have to be admitted to the hospital,” Dr. Long said.

Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in New York City have increased in recent weeks, according to The New York Times’s tracker, driven largely by the highly contagious Omicron subvariant BA.2.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of Paxlovid pills have gone unused, and the White House announced plans this week to expand access.

The city’s health department said more than 17,500 courses of Paxlovid had been distributed so far in New York City, the bulk of those through an online pharmacy called Alto. Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the health commissioner, described uptake as “significant.” The city has worked to get the word out through newspaper ads and public service announcements.

“We’re in a new phase of the pandemic response, where we’ve got a range of tools at our disposal,” said Dr. Vasan.

But some experts believe far too few people know about the treatments.

“I’m not really sure that the average person who needs Paxlovid — by that I mean older people, people with comorbidities or otherwise medically vulnerable, unvaccinated people — know this critical information,” said Dr. Denis Nash, a professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York.

Paxlovid, a Pfizer drug that was authorized in late December, is one of several available treatments that have been proven effective against Covid-19. It is preferred by the federal government and New York City officials because of how effectively it reduced the risk of death and hospitalization from Covid-19 in high-risk, unvaccinated adults during trials.


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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/nyregion/covid-treatments-nyc.html