Kai KupferschmidtScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.Hundreds of drug trials around the world have been testing possible COVID-19 treatments, but almost none have been in Africa.
Now, researchers on the continent are mounting a large effort to try to answer a crucial question that has gotten relatively little attention: Could cheap, widely available drugs prevent patients with mild illness from becoming severely sick?“This is the first major drug trial across the continent,” says epidemiologist John Amuasi, who leads the Ghanaian arm of the Africa-wide project, named ANTICOV. “I would have liked this to come much earlier, but it’s really great that this is happening.”What is.