Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Feb 8;23(1):40-47.
doi: 10.24875/AIDSRev.200001261.

The Importance of Understanding the Stages of COVID-19 in Treatment and Trials

Daniel O Griffin  1 , Denise Brennan-Rieder  2 , Binh Ngo  3 , Pierre Kory  4 , Marco Confalonieri  5 , Leland Shapiro  6 , Jose Iglesias  7 , Michael Dube  3 , Neha Nanda  3 , Gino K In  3 , Daniel Arkfeld  3 , Preet Chaudhary  3 , Vito M Campese  3 , Diana L Hanna  3 , David Sawcer  3 , Glenn Ehresmann  3 , David Peng  3 , Miroslaw Smorgorzewski  3 , April Amstrong  3 , Eivind H Vinjevoll  8 , Rajkumar Dasgupta  3 , Fred R Sattler  3 , Cristina Mussini  9 , Oriol Mitjà  10 , Vicente Soriano  11 , Nicolas Peschanski  12 , Gilles Hayem  13 , Maria Carmela Piccirillo  14 , António Lobo-Ferreira  15 , Iraldo B Rivero  16 , Ivan F H Hung  17 , Marc Rendell  18 , Stephen Ditmore  19 , Joseph Varon  20 , Paul Marik  21
Affiliations

The Importance of Understanding the Stages of COVID-19 in Treatment and Trials

Daniel O Griffin et al. AIDS Rev. .

Abstract

COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, continues to be a major health problem since its first description in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Multiple drugs have been tried to date in the treatment of COVID-19. Critical to treatment of COVID-19 and advancing therapeutics is an appreciation of the multiple stages of this disease and the importance of timing for investigation and use of various agents. We considered articles related to COVID-19 indexed on PubMed published January 1, 2020-November 15, 2020, and considered papers on the medRxiv preprint server. We identified relevant stages of COVID-19 including three periods: pre-exposure, incubation, and detectable viral replication; and five phases: the viral symptom phase, the early inflammatory phase, the secondary infection phase, the multisystem inflammatory phase, and the tail phase. This common terminology should serve as a framework to guide when COVID-19 therapeutics being studied or currently in use is likely to provide benefit rather than harm.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; Phases; Cytokine storm; Antivirals; Immunotherapy.

PubMed Disclaimer