Coronavirus update: Hydroxycloroquine showing good results, says Donald Trump

Decades old malaria-drug Hydroxychloroquine appears to have some good results in the treatment of coronavirus patients, US president Donald Trump has said.

"We continue to study the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and other therapies in the treatment and prevention of the virus and will keep the American people fully informed in our findings," Trump told reporters during a press briefing at the White House on Friday. Trump said that it looked as if Hydroxychloroquine is having some good results.

"It's looking like it (Hydroxychloroquine) is having some good results. I hope that would be a phenomenal thing, Trump said, days after the US Federal and Drug Administration approved the drug being used in the treatment of coronavirus (COVID-19) patients.

The Trump administration has stockpiled millions of doses of Hydroxychloroquine, given the urgency of the situation."We have a tremendous supply of it, we ordered in the case that it works and it's going to have some pretty big impacts. We'll see what happens, Trump said.

However, a top member of the White House Task Force on Coronavirus has cautioned against arriving at any conclusion right now as tests in this regard are still underway.

"We still need to do the definitive studies to determine whether any intervention, not just this one, is truly safe and effective," Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Fox News in an interview.

But when you don't have that information, it's understandable why people might want to take something anyway even with the slightest hint of being effective, he said. A COVID-19 patient on Friday attributed her recovery to Hydroxychloroquine.

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On day three of her hospitalisation at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Schwing Schwing was given Hydroxychloroquine. She told the local ABC affiliate that the malaria drug worked.

"I don't know how much of my recovery was due to the cocktail and how much of it was due to the length of the time I was spending recovering, but something certainly shifted," Schwing said. The US till Friday reported 7,380 deaths and at least 276,500 infections due to the deadly coronavirus, the highest for any country in the world.

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