Various Evidence-Based Hypothetical and Experimental Treatment Approaches and Their Effectiveness against COVID-19 Worldwide: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

Several drugs are presently undergoing clinical studies to investigate their efficacy and safety in the handling of 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Despite of the fact, certain encouraging results have been obtained thus far, however, these treatments have resulted in controversy as these are not based on data generated from direct conventional clinical trials. As the legal requirement for approval of drug is "substantial" evidence of effectiveness demonstrated through controlled clinical trials and requires a large portion of time. A number of clinical trials are currently in progress to evalu-ate possible therapies, but the worldwide reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak has been mostly restricted to monitoring/ suppression. In the meantime, scientists are struggling to discover antivirals specific to the virus either by screening/ testing available broad-spectrum antiviral drugs or redevelopment of newer particular drugs based on individual coro-navirus (CoV) genome. Upto date, the hypothetical and experimental treatment approaches against COVID-19 that are tested or being testing are the use of antimalarial and antibiotics, antivirals, anti-parasitic, immunomodulators, antico-agulant treatment, antihypertensive, chinese traditional medicines and others (high temperature and high humidity) as well as vaccines development. This review summarized all the literature-based treatment approaches in various ways that are implementing for the management or treatment of COVID-19.