COVID-19 hospitalizations in Maine are back on the rise. And Dr. Dora Anne Mills, chief health improvement officer for MaineHealth, says unfortunately, a lot of patients probably could have avoided getting severely ill from the virus.
"Many of them — about half at least — did not know that they could have gotten medications that could have prevented the hospitalizations," she says.
Paxlovid is one of those medications. It's an oral antiviral drug that can reduce COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths by nearly 90%. The Biden administration pledged Tuesday to double the amount that's distributed across the country.
When Paxlovid first received emergency authorization last December, supply was tight. Now, says Dr. James Jarvis of Northern Light Health, there's ample but underutilized supply. Part of the reason, he says, is the prevalence of at-home tests, which puts the onus on patients to ask for the drug.
"If you're taking an at-home test," Jarvis says, "we don't know whether you've received that test result, and so therefore we can't be proactive about it and so you have to be proactive."
And a lot of people are eligible. Anyone who is at high risk of severe disease from COVID could benefit, Mills says, including people 65 years and older as well as those with underlying conditions, which can range from cancer to psychiatric illness, to diabetes and pregnancy.
"Basically, I would say most people qualify unless they are very healthy and young," Mills says.
Several dozen hospitals, pharmacies and clinics currently offer oral medication, according to a state website that lists COVID-19 treatment sites. But half of Maine's counties only list one or two locations. That could change under the Biden administration plan, which aims to boost the number of pharmacies that carry Paxlovid as well as "test-to-treat" sites, which are essentially one-stop shopping to get both a test and medication.
Erich Fogg, clinical director of York Hospital's test-to-treat site, says it has gone so well that they're planning to expand access by allowing all primary care providers in their network to prescribe Paxlovid.
"So you don't have to come through the one therapeutic clinic I've set up," Fogg says.
It will be better for patients who take other medications, he says, because Paxlovid does have some drug interactions.
"Talking to your own primary care provider about the risk and benefit or perhaps adjusting the current medications you're taking to make that drug-drug interaction more tolerable is much more efficiently done by the provider who knows you best," he says.
Health providers stress that the medication should be taken as soon as possible after testing positive. And they say preventing hospitalization not only benefits the person who has COVID-19, but the health system as a whole, which is consistently under stress.
