Corticosteroids for COVID-19

Overview

This guideline reflects an innovation from the WHO, driven by an urgent need for global collaboration to provide trustworthy and living COVID-19 guidance informing policy and practice worldwide during an outbreak of an emerging infectious disease, such as this pandemic. For this purpose, WHO has partnered with the non-profit Magic Evidence Ecosystem Foundation (MAGIC) for methodologic support, to develop and disseminate living guidance for COVID-19 drug treatments. WHO also partnered with investigators of seven trials on corticosteroids to conduct a prospective meta-analysis of randomized trials for corticosteroid therapy for COVID-19 (PMA), in order to rapidly provide additional evidence to build on RECOVERY data and inform guidance development. Drawing on these data, an international panel of content experts, patients, clinicians and methodologists (no conflicts of interest declared for any of the participants) produced recommendations following standards for trustworthy guideline development using the GRADE approach. We considered an individual patient perspective and contextual factors (i.e. resources, feasibility, acceptability, equity) for countries and health care systems.