How Preventative Medications May Impact the Lingering Impact of COVID-19

While the general public may view the COVID-19 pandemic as a thing of the past, the virus continues to impact a significant number of people each year. Worse yet, many people who get sick with COVID find themselves facing long-term impacts, even after the initial sickness has passed.

Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with Florin Draica, senior vice president of US medical affairs at Shionogi, about the status of the disease and how new treatment methods are still being developed, such as XOCOVA. The FDA-approved medication is designed to be taken after exposure to the virus but before symptoms set in, in order to prevent serious illness.

Dr. Draica spoke about the ongoing impact of COVID, along with the industry’s broader need to start pursuing preventative medicines more often. By doing this, the public health playbook could focus on preventing illness while also treating people who still get sick.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How might preventative medications impact the lingering impact of COVID-19?
Dr. Florin Draica: COVID-19 continues to affect millions of people in the United States and worldwide. One thing worth noting is that we tend to assess its impact by comparing it to the pandemic years — and I think that framing is not entirely accurate.

Even mild to moderate COVID-19 infection can have a genuinely damaging impact on people with chronic underlying conditions. Consider a patient with COPD or asthma: even a mild case of COVID-19 can trigger an exacerbation. The same is true for patients with chronic kidney disease, neurological conditions, or cardiovascular disease. COVID-19 can disrupt the fragile balance of disease management in these populations in ways that extend well beyond the acute phase.

That worsening does not always happen immediately. It does not always show up in the first two weeks, or even the first month. We are seeing a growing body of studies showing detrimental impacts from exacerbation of underlying health conditions at six months, and even up to a year after the acute infection. The damage may be more lasting than acute hospitalization data alone would suggest. Hospitalizations from acute COVID-19 have certainly decreased compared to the pandemic — but we are increasingly recognizing a category of lasting harm that is harder to observe in the short term.

This matters especially because many Americans carry multiple risk conditions simultaneously. Someone with chronic kidney disease who also has diabetes faces a cumulative risk profile. The concern is not just what happens during the acute infection — it is what may be triggered over the longer term.

For all of these reasons, testing and exposure notification remain critically important. When someone tests positive, informing the people they have recently been in contact with — a phone call, a message, a simple heads-up — gives those individuals the opportunity to act. And today, with ensitrelvir and XOCOVA available, exposed individuals have the option to prevent COVID-19 from developing altogether, if they take the antiviral within three days of exposure.