We need a vaccine AND a good treatment. Ther eis some optimism with HIV drugs, such as remdesivir. They are being used, they from what I've heard, it may help reduce viral load (much like they do with HIV). This virus does appear to have a dose dependent effect to it. Once someone has ARDS and is on dialysis...this is an unbelievable difficult disease to treat (not unlike other diseases that cause ARDS and kidney failure). More physicians are advocating early treatment with the HIV drugs and/or hydroxychloraquine (depending on who you want to believe) and I think that the logic behind it makes since. But you don't have an unlimited amount of medication and it isn't very well studied right now, so patient selection is a bit of a question. But if we can prevent ARDS and acute kidney injury from happening in the first place, that's huge. Waiting until someone is on death's doorstep might be a little bit too late in the game. I definitely could invision the medicines being used in hospitalized, pre-intubated patients. I don't think that we have the supply and the research to suggest that it needs to be done in outpatients. I've heard some healthcare workers who get repeated exposure would like prophylaxis, much like prophylaxis is used for needle sticks in HIV patients, and I think that is very reasonable assuming that the healthcare worker truly is high risk and we have the national supply.
We will very likely be waiting a while for a vaccine. The soonest that a vaccine has been rushed into production is four years. One year seem optimistic. But certainly, a vaccine will be nice, especially in the high risk populations (healthcare workers, elderly, immunocompromised, family members of immunocompromised).