GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) released new clinical advice on Tuesday for the treatment of patients with COVID-19, including those who have persistent symptoms after recovery, and also said it recommends using anticoagulants in low doses to prevent blood clots.
“The other new things in the guidelines are that patients with COVID-19 at home must have the use of pulse oximetry, which is the measurement of oxygen levels, so that you can identify whether anything at home is deteriorating and would be better to have hospital care, ”said WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris at a UN press conference in Geneva.
The WHO advised doctors to place patients in a prone position, facing forward, to improve oxygen flow, she said.
“We also recommend, we suggest, the use of low-dose anticoagulants to prevent the formation of clots in the blood vessels. We suggest using lower doses instead of higher doses because higher doses can lead to other problems, ”said Harris.
She added that a WHO-led team of independent experts, currently in the city of Wuhan, in central China, where the first human cases were detected in December 2019, must leave the quarantine for the next two days to continue its work with Chinese researchers. in the origins of the virus.
She declined to comment on reports of delays in the distribution of vaccines in the European Union. She said she had no specific data and that WHO’s priority was for health professionals in all countries to be vaccinated in the first 100 days of the year.
AstraZeneca, which developed its initiative with the University of Oxford, told the EU on Friday that it could not meet the agreed supply targets by the end of March.
Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay and Emma Farge