Amid rising COVID-19 cases in the country, the health department in West Bengal has decided to scrap monoclonal antibody cocktail and antiviral molnupiravir in revised COVID-19 treatment protocol, said reports.
According to reports, molnupiravir has been only recently approved and many hospitals across Kolkata have been using the cocktail therapy on patients.
Meanwhile, amid concerns over the Omicron variant of coronavirus, doctors in Kolkata believe that there is no requirement for antibody cocktail for most of the patients as the formula is not useful for the Omicron variant of coronavirus.
"Antibody cocktails are only useful for a small segment of people. For most of the people with COVID or almost 99 per cent of the patients will not need antibody cocktail. Only patients above 60 years or have comorbidities in their initial 4-5 days of the initial disease may help from antibody cocktail. Antibody cocktail is not going to be a great solution for the COVID pandemic," Dr Abhijit Chowdhury of SSKM Hospital, told news agency ANI.
Meanwhile, cardiac surgeon Dr Kunal Sarkar of Medica Superspeciality Hospital gave emphasis on adequate data of Omicron infection.
"We are still in a decision-making dilemma since we do not know what proportion is Omicron and what proportion is Delta. If you presume it is delta then you may have some use. If you presume it is Omicron then an antibody cocktail will not be useful. As doctors, we request governments to come up with more substantial data because we need to know the proportions of Omicron cases. We need to have the trend of infections in each city," Dr Sarkar told ANI.
West Bengal reported 9,073 new COVID-19 cases during the last 24 hours, said the state health department on Tuesday. 3,768 people recovered from the infection during the last 24 hours. 16 people lost their lives to the disease during the last 24 hours. There are currently 25,475 active COVID-19 cases in the state.
(With inputs from ANI)
