Connecting BCG Vaccination and COVID-19: Additional Data

Devi Dayal; Saniya Gupta

The ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is posing a grave threat to global public health. With more than one million confirmed cases and the global death toll alarmingly crossing 50,000 on April 3, there is a climate of fear, social disruption, institutional breakdown, and scientific uncertainty. The devastation caused by COVID-19 pandemic probably parallels the "Spanish flu" pandemic, still considered the most devastating in human history that affected an estimated one third of the world population at that time of which more than 2.5% died (1) . The world governments working in tandem with the health organisations are making all possible efforts to establish countermeasures to reduce the devastating effects of COVID-19. The world's top healthcare systems appear shaken and the pandemic has forced the medical fraternity to realise something very basic that life is not always in the doctors' hands, and to feel that being a doctor will never be the same after this pandemic (2) . Since there is no definitive treatment or an effective vaccine for disease control, the scientific community has been making frenetic efforts to find measures for cure or for at least reducing the morbidity due to . A large number of therapeutic measures such as low-dose methylprednisolone, chloroquine phosphate, hydroxychloroquine, ribavirin, angiotensin receptor 2 blockers, anti-ageing drugs such as azithromycin, quercetin, rapamycin and doxycycline, IL-1 or IL-1R suppressors, protease inhibitors such as lopinavir/ritonavir, acetazolamide, nifedipine, phosphodiesterase inhibitors, convalescent plasma transfusions, tocilizumab, traditional Chinese medicine, statins, zinc supplements, and therapeutic neutralizing and monoclonal antibodies have been either tried or suggested for patients with COVID-19 over a short span of about 4 months in the desperate hope of an effective treatment of these patients (3) . Commensurate with the unprecedented times, the . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.