Tested positive for COVID? Here’s how to get oral medication in Fresno

For more than a year and a half, the focus of COVID-19 messaging from the Fresno County Department of Public Health has been on getting people vaccinated.

The vaccines are intended to prevent people from catching the virus, or reduce the severity of an infection if they do catch it after their shots or boosters.

Vaccines won’t help, however, if a person already has contracted COVID-19, particularly if they are at greater risk for complications from the virus and its respiratory disease. That’s where therapeutic treatments and drugs, including oral medications, come into play.

Now the county is trying to get the word out about where people can find those drugs.

“We are at a different stage in the pandemic,” Dr. Trinidad Solis, deputy health officer with the county health department, said in a briefing for reporters on Thursday. “Unlike before, we have a lot of good therapeutics available.”

One of the most notable is Paxlovid, an oral anti-viral pill. “It works best if you take it within the first five days of your symptoms,” Solis said. “This medication is highly effective, the most effective of all the treatments we have. The studies show it’s close to 90% effective at reducing the risk of being hospitalized and dying due to COVID.”

“Especially if you’re high risk –older age, chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure or obesity – it’s very recommended to get medication,” she added.

The first option for a patient to get Paxlovid or another oral treatment is to contact their primary care doctor. “But some patients have reported that it can be tough to get an appointment right away,” Solis said.

A second option is to visit one of many “test to treat” sites scattered across Fresno County. “These are sites where you go and get tested for COVID and you’re evaluated by a medical professional,” Solis said. “If you meet the criteria, that can prescribe you a Paxlovid prescription or another oral antiviral available.”

And within the past few weeks, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration authorized pharmacists to prescribe and provide Paxlovid. “Before, it was only physicians that were able to prescribe it,” Solis said.

The county is also promoting the UCSF-Fresno COVID Equity Project, which offers its own testing, vaccination and test-to-treat programs at its site on Shaw Avenue in Fresno, across from the Fresno Fashion Fair shopping center

Not everyone is getting that message, however. One elderly reader who contacted The Fresno Bee this week reported that after he tested positive for COVID-19 using an at-home, rapid antigen test kit, he called the Fresno County Department of Public Health to ask where he could seek treatment.

The person who answered the phone wasn’t able to provide any information about treatment, the reader said, and would not transfer his call to a supervisor. He also said that when he called major retail chain pharmacies Walgreens and CVS, the stores said they had no information about being able to prescribe Paxlovid.

County health officials said they would try to do a better job of making sure the people who answer their phones have what they need to provide answers to callers who are unable to navigate the county’s website to find treatment information.

For people who don’t qualify for one of the oral medications, an alternative treatment called monoclonal antibodies is available. Monoclonal antibodies are given as an infusion through a needle into a person’s bloodstream to stimulate the body’s immune response to COVID-19.

The availability of treatments is rising in importance as vaccination rates have grown stagnant in Fresno County. So far, just over 60% of Fresno County’s one-million-plus residents who are eligible to get a coronavirus shot are fully vaccinated.

More than 330,000 others – over one-third of the county’s population – have yet to receive even a single dose of the three available vaccine products.

That leaves a lot of people at risk to catch the virus. Since the first local cases in the worldwide coronavirus pandemic were reported in March 2020, more than 260,000 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases have occurred in Fresno County.

Amid a current surge of new infections driven by the highly contagious BA5 omicron subvariant, almost 3,300 new confirmed cases were reported this week in the county.

Hospitalizations are also on the rise, reaching their highest levels since late February in Fresno County. As of Wednesday, 241 confirmed COVID-19 patients were receiving inpatient care at hospitals across the county – more than seven times as many patients as three months earlier.

More information about COVID-19 treatments is available online at the Fresno County Department of Public Health website at co.fresno.ca.us/departments/public-health/covid-19. From that home page, users can click on different buttons to find details about vaccines, treatments, testing, and test-to-treat sites.

More information on the UCSF-Fresno COVID-19 Equity Project’s testing and test-to-treat programs is available online at www.fresno.ucsf.edu/cep/ or calling 559-349-8082. The clinic is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and is closed on Saturdays and Sundays.