Budesonide appears to reduce the need for hospitalisations as well as recovery time for COVID-19 patients if given within seven days of mild symptoms appearing, say researchers at the UK’s University of Oxford.

Their 28-day open label phase 2 trial of 146 patients — half of whom took 800µg of budesonide twice a day — found that inhaled budesonide reduced the risk of urgent care or hospitalisation by 90% when compared with usual care.

Only one of the participants taking budesonide required urgent care, emergency department assessment or hospitalisation, compared to 10 in the usual care group, in findings published on preprint server medRxiv.

Initial data from the study also found clinical recovery was one day shorter (seven days) than for those in the control arm.