Living WHO guideline on drugs for covid-19 by Will Stahl-Timmins

Many drugs have been evaluated for treating patients with covid-19 at different disease severities. The resulting research has been published in enormous quantities at unprecedented speeds. To make sense of this deluge of information, The BMJ (British Medical Journal) partnered with the World Health Organisation to provide a set of guidelines that could be continuously updated as research is published. Currently on its 12th revision, the living guideline provides recommendations for and against 16 drugs. The principal method of presenting these recommendations is in an interactive graphic, which allows clinicians and researchers to get an overview first, then drill down into the details of what the data shows about each treatment, and help them and their patients decide which medications will be the most beneficial for them. The living guideline format is innovative, and unusual in scientific publishing. It required us to do a lot of work behind the scenes to mostly automate the production of the graphics from a set of data files. This allows us to efficiently update the graphic on a regular basis. This guildeline is now the definitive source on the efficacy of different covid-19 treatments, and will continue to be so while the project is ongoing.