Antivirals, at the current level, can’t extinguish a disease. They can at best drastically improve the outcome of individuals, but to do that you need to diagnose said individuals, make a cost-benefit judgement, put them on antivirals and wait for their contagiousness to drop. Compare this to prophylactics like vaccines, or even what an ivermectin / hydrochloride style drug might do.
You don’t really want to be 100% reactive to the disease. Assume you have the perfect antiviral, and every time somebody gets moderately sick they go to the local pharmacy, pay $1 and get better in 24 hours. This will still allow a new virus billions of hosts to spread and evolve, and you get Alpha, Delta, and god forbid an Omega variant. Old viruses have been playing this game with our immune system for millennia—we don’t know how far a new virus might get if we give it room enough to evolve. Prophylactic solutions (no matter what their mechanism) work by cutting the spread along with disease severity, and by cutting spread you cut the possibility for the virus to evolve.
Antivirals, at the current level, can’t extinguish a disease. They can at best drastically improve the outcome of individuals, but to do that you need to diagnose said individuals, make a cost-benefit judgement, put them on antivirals and wait for their contagiousness to drop. Compare this to prophylactics like vaccines, or even what an ivermectin / hydrochloride style drug might do.
You don’t really want to be 100% reactive to the disease. Assume you have the perfect antiviral, and every time somebody gets moderately sick they go to the local pharmacy, pay $1 and get better in 24 hours. This will still allow a new virus billions of hosts to spread and evolve, and you get Alpha, Delta, and god forbid an Omega variant. Old viruses have been playing this game with our immune system for millennia—we don’t know how far a new virus might get if we give it room enough to evolve. Prophylactic solutions (no matter what their mechanism) work by cutting the spread along with disease severity, and by cutting spread you cut the possibility for the virus to evolve.
Ivermectin is an antiviral in the context of COVID-19 (provided it works of course).