Drugs for COVID-19: A Publishing Epidemic

As of April 9, PubMed listed 2,868 scientific publications which incorporate the word “COVID”.   323 of these (11.3%) were related to drugs under study for treatment of the disease. No fewer than thirty-one such drugs had been proposed since this pandemic first appeared on the planet four months earlier.    Graph 1 depicts the cumulative numbers of COVID-19 infection (per 100,000 global population) and introductions of relevant drugs into the Literature during February 14 to April 3. Note that both increased by a factor of approximately 16-fold during this period. In a biological sense, the “doubling time” for drug publication is similar to that of COVID-19 infection. Indeed, just as there is an incubation period between acquisition of the disease and the reporting of a given case, there is a delay period between submission of an article and it’s appearance in PubMed (one suspects that this process has been streamlined during the current emergency)  There may even be an element of “contagion” at work in the publishing “explosion”  Many of the papers on COVID are repetitive, and an increasing number are reactive; ie, published in support – or in criticism – of other papers. The most notable example involves the use of Hydroxychloroquine.  Inevitably, a wide variety of existing antiviral drugs have been proposed for the treatment of COVID-19. These agent...
Source: GIDEON blog - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Epidemiology Graphs Source Type: blogs