Covid: How new drugs are finally taming the virus

'Two years ago we had nothing,'' says Dr Matthias Schmid, head of infectious diseases at the RVI, who treated the UK's first Covid patient at the end of January 2020. 'Now we have a range of treatments available which reduce the severity and prevent death in a huge number of patients.' They include the cheap anti-inflammatory steroid dexamethasone, the first drug proven to save the lives of people seriously ill with Covid, which was discovered through a ground-breaking NHS trial. 'It's feeling more normal for us,' says Dr Miriam Baruch, intensive care medicine consultant. 'It's really nice that we can train our doctors for the variety of patients that we get.'