As the whole world is racing to find a cure that would stop the fatalities caused by the novel coronavirus, UK scientists announced that they have already reached a cure for this enemy of humanity.
They have described the use of common steroid drug dexamethasone in treating the coronavirus as a "major breakthrough". This new cure is a cheap and available for COVID-19 patients.
The drug, dexamethasone, reduced death rates by a third for patients on ventilators, and by a fifth for patients needing oxygen.
Professor Peter Horby, a University of Oxford academic who led the trial, said "what we saw was really quite remarkable".
He said the drug reduced death rates by around 35% for COVID-19 patients on ventilators, and by about 20% for patients needing oxygen.
Speaking at the daily Downing Street news briefing, he said: "In three months, we have enrolled over 11,500 patients and this makes it by far the biggest clinical trial in the world."
Professor Horby said the majority of patients being treated in hospital for COVID-19 were likely to benefit from the study, after conducting a trial comparing 2,000 people being treated with the drug and 4,000 without.
On his part, Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed it as the "biggest breakthrough yet" in treating the virus.
So far, the pandemic, which first showed up in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has killed around 450 thousand people world wide and infected more than 8 million people.
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