Essay: COVID-19 Pandemic: The Hunt for Effective Vaccines and Treatments

COVID-19 or corona viruses have been taken over the world’s half population into the vent. As it is declared Pandemic condition which lead to a hush in the microbiology labs and of course hospitals. Corona viruses is not much complex microbes compare to the HIV and the just as viruses it has specific genes in downstream regions that encode proteins for viral replication, nucelocapsid and spikes formation. Due to loosely attached receptor binding domain it is contagious. The side effects not been noted and hence, it is equal to the having slow poison and there are no medications provided to the patients who had recovered from the infection causing holes in the lung cavity as well as the medication for bringing back the elasticity of the epithelial cells. Although the mortality rate is just 3% but the rate of outbreak and the invasion is similar to the seasonal allergies.
This pandemic demands the critical need for rapid development of vaccines and antiviral treatments to reduce the number of hospitalizations and deaths, but there is an even larger threat lurking behind the current outbreak. It is the hidden threat from antibiotic resistance — bacteria that are not killed by standard antibiotics. Unfortunately, the pipeline of drugs to manage these deadly infections is nearly dry.
Many antibiotics came in picture but how can an antibiotic work on the viruses?
Novel corona virus originated from the sea food at Wuhan; the zoonotic source of SARS-COV2 is not confirmed but sequence-based analysis suggested bats as the key reservoir and DNA recombinant suggested the spike protein is similar to SARS- COV. SARS-CoV is closer to SARS – like bat CoVs. But the medication of SARS hasn’t shown any promising result with the CoV infection, we can state that it is kind of antibiotic resistance.
In early stages or the one who is working as the front line for treating infected patients are the one who is at the high risk of getting infected or being in continuous exposure to the CoVID -19 threat as they are provided with hydroxychloroquine an anti-protozoal drug which is been used as classic treatment for the Malaria.
The recent study has shown that Hydroxychloroquine efficiency has been lowered with the usage to the frontline and has been concluded that yes, coronavirus have become resistance to the drug.
Although there is no available vaccine against COVID-19, initially interferons-  nebulisation, broad- spectrum antibiotics and antiviral drugs were used to reduce the effectiveness of the virus. Remdesivir with Chloroquine had shown some promising results however, various other anti- viral is currently under observation against infections. Nafamostat, Ribavirin, Penciclovir, Favipiravir exhibited moderate results when tested against infection in patient.
Azithromycin isn’t the only antibiotic being put to nonstandard use for Covid – 19 and they are still experimenting with tetracycline, doxycycline, amoxicillin and teicoplanin and dependent onto the last drug used against MRSA, to try to prevent Coronavirus. Antiprotozoal Invermectin with the doxycycline an antibiotic had shown miraculous result in curing patients from Bangladesh.
As we can note that a single species of virus is been exposed to antiprotozoal, antibacterial and even antifungal drugs and the just as a common virus; coronavirus do carry characteristic of mutating its genome sequences. The Genome sequence provided by the China was incapable for drug against infection because the virus had mutated itself when it reached India or USA.
There are 110% chances of antimicrobial resistance to appear, if increase in resistances occurs then there won’t be drug to fix this problem.
“The use of antibiotics anywhere contributes to the emergence of resistance everywhere,” says Kathy Talkington, director of the antibiotic resistance project at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The mutated (modified) corona is no exception. Already, it is noted that 1 in 7 patients hospitalized with CoVid-19 has acquired resistance to the covid-19 initial medication and get infected with secondary bacterial infection which lead to 50% of patient’s dead.
There are such chances what if when we finally discovered a vaccine for corona but it doesn’t work well due to extreme or super resistance towards the new drug. This is a valid point because to find a vaccine in such a small pace of time which is leading, we are exposing viruses to the as many drugs we are access to which eventually somewhere heading towards the resistance and strengthen the virus to overcome any new drug by mutating or loading anti resistance gene.
The challenge of antibiotic resistance could become an enormous force of additional sickness and death across our health system as the toll of corona virus stretches critical care units beyond their capacity. The biggest threat lurking behind the CoVid-19 is resistance thus, the small pictures do clear the picture of antimicrobial resistance is going parallel with it.
Keywords: COVID- 19, Antimicrobials, Super resistance, Mutating, Resistance