30,000 packs of pills for treatment of Covid-19 arrive in Bulgaria within days. How will they be distributed?

Within days, Bulgaria expects to receive the first quantities of Merck and Pfizer pills for the treatment of Covid-19, the Ministry of Health announced on January 20.

Medication used to treat the virus in the first days of infection will be covered by the state in the so-called. Covid packages.

The pills are dispensed by the companies that produce them on a quota basis, the Ministry of Health told BNT.

Bulgaria will receive the entire amount it has agreed on, but it turns out that it is not large - we expect 20,000 packages of Merck's medicine and 10,000 from Pfizer.

The pills will be prescribed with electronic prescriptions at the discretion of the doctor. However, doctors are still waiting for instructions on which patients are most suitable for the medication.

The medical specialist on duty at the municipal Covid centre at Diagnostic Consultative Centre 2 in Plovdiv feel the load of the new Covid wave on a daily basis.

With the delivery of the new medication, the pressure from patients insisting on getting them is expected to increase. And this will happen in days.

The contracts have been signed, the delivery procedure is completed and I hope that for the Pfizer medication we will literally shorten the delivery time as much as possible, we will have them in Bulgaria in 4-5 days. We take some of the medicines in a shortened procedure, because normally we should expect their approval from EMA, but we use one opportunity to negotiate them at national level, because we have no other way. If we wait for EMA to approve them, we will get them probably in the summer," said Deputy Health Minister Georgi Yordanov.

The medicines will be prescribed with an electronic prescription from the respective covid areas or the GPs. However, most GPs refuse to work with Covid packages because the ministry does not grant them additional funds for the treatment of coronavirus patients.

"This already gives our colleagues a reason not to deal with Covid patients, it is perfectly acceptable at the moment for a GP who has been called or visited by a person with Covid symptoms to tell the patient to leave and go to a Covid zone," commented Dr. Kostadin Sotirov, Chairman of the Association of General Practitioners in Plovdiv.

And the Covid zones expect precise instructions regarding which patients should be prescribed the pills for the treatment of Covid.

They will be prescribed to patients who need them. It will not be because someone is entitled, added Dr. Nikolai Petkov from the municipal Covid centre in Plovdiv.

In countries where it is already used, the Merck pill is used in adults with initial symptoms of COVID-19 who are at the highest risk of hospitalisation, including those who are overweight and have heart disease.

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