Africa UN Knowledge Hub for COVID-19

When Christina Brennan initially planned a clinical trial to test the use of famotidine for treating mild COVID-19, she wrote a protocol that involved participants occasionally coming in for lab work at an internal medicine clinic. Enrollment in trials run by Brennan and her colleagues on hospitalized COVID-19 patients was waning following last spring’s surge, so she’d shifted her focus to studying COVID-19 patients who were fighting the disease at home. But in speaking with the clinic’s doctors last summer, she learned that patients who had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 would not be allowed in the clinic of the nonprofit provider Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare system.