Anxiety over virus caused woman to take excessive HCQ drug

A woman who wasn't infected with novel coronavirus took an excessive amount of a drug she bought online out of anxiety and was hospitalized in Wuhan, Hubei province, according to online news website thepaper.cn.

The Wuhan native was sent to the intensive care unit at the Wuhan Puren Hospital on Sunday with symptoms of mental disorders and fatally abnormal heart rhythm after she took 18 tablets, or 1.8 grams, of a drug called HCQ within 24 hours, the hospital's doctor, Huang Haidong, told media on Tuesday.

The patient is now out of danger, but still needs medical observation, Huang said.

HCQ, previously used for treating malaria and lupus, has similarities with chloroquine diphosphate, a trial drug listed in the sixth version of the novel coronavirus pneumonia treatment plan by the National Health Commission.

"The woman bought the HCQ on e-commerce platform and took them probably because it is preliminarily proved effective to treat the virus in clinical experiments," Huang said.

But the woman wasn't infected with the virus, and there are no confirmed or suspected cases in her family, he said, calling for people to follow doctors' advice when taking the two kinds of prescription drugs.

"The public may easily be in panic during the epidemic," he said, suggesting people should communicate with family members and care about each other's mental health to prevent them from excessively taking drugs due to anxiety.

On Saturday, the Hubei provincial health commission urged all medical staff to strictly monitor patients who are taking the chloroquine phosphate because the lethal dose of the drug was found to be around 2 to 4 grams for adults.