COVID-19-Positive Patient in Primary Care -- How Should You Treat?

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Welcome to Cases in Deprescribing. In this series, I present a clinical scenario drawn from my own practice. I will share with you what I plan to do, but I am more interested in crowdsourcing a response from all of you to collectively determine best practice.

Please answer the polling question and contribute to the comments section with your own thoughts, particularly if you disagree with me.

You are seeing a 53-year-old woman whose test came back positive for COVID-19 yesterday. She complains of 4 days of fever to 102.5˚ F and wet cough with some shortness of breath. Her respiratory rate, temperature, and physical examination are normal in the office, except for a pulse rate of 105 beats/minute. Her pulse oximetry reading is 95%. She is otherwise healthy and asks if you can give her a course of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to fight the infection.

The patient is accompanied by her partner, who is 50 years of age and feels well. She has no chronic medical conditions, but she started taking vitamin C at a dose of 4000 mg/day and black elderberry daily several days ago. Her partner wants to know if she should take these supplements to prevent getting infected.

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Cite this: COVID-19-Positive Patient in Primary Care -- How Should You Treat? - Medscape - Apr 27, 2020.