Summary

This time last year, physicians around the world prepared, most for the first time in their careers, to treat a new disease—over and over and over again. In the harrowing months that followed, clinical evidence on how to treat the pandemic coronavirus poured in—a muddy torrent of hundreds of thousands of papers, preprints, and press releases. Today, COVID-19 remains enigmatic—and deadly—but physicians have gleaned a rough understanding of COVID-19’s pathology and an aspirational strategy for treating it. A few therapies have risen to the top, including monoclonal antibodies to fight the virus soon after infection and the immunosuppressant drugs dexamethasone and tocilizumab to tame inflammation as disease progresses. Doctors now describe a year of scientific progress they couldn’t have imagined—and a crisis that brought into stark relief the challenges of applying research to the art of medicine.

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