Abstract
SARS-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the etiologic agent of the new lung disease COVID-19 is closely related to SARS-CoV, and together with MERS-CoV are three new human coronaviruses that emerged in the last 20 years. The COVID-19 outbreak is a rapidly evolving situation with higher transmissibility and infectivity compared with SARS and MERS. Clinical presentations range from asymptomatic or mild symptoms to severe illness. The prevalent cause of mortality is pneumonia that progresses to ARDS. The ongoing pandemic has already resulted in more than 135,000 deaths and an unprecedented burden on national health systems worldwide. Pending the availability of a vaccine, there is a critical need to identify effective treatments and a number of clinical trials have been implemented worldwide. Trials are based on repurposed drugs that are already approved for other infections, have acceptable safety profiles or have performed well in animal studies against the other two deadly coronaviruses. Supportive care remains the mainstay of therapy at present, as it is still unclear how well these data can be extrapolated to SARS-CoV-2. Most of those emerging re-introduced drugs are administered to patients in the context of clinical trials. In this review, we summarize the strategies currently employed in the treatment of COVID-19.