Paxlovid can lessen the chance of a severe COVID-19 illness. Why is it underused?

Tens of thousands of Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19 every week. The drug, Paxlovid, is lauded by experts as a powerful tool that can prevent hospitalization and death from COVID-19. “When you read in your local newspaper that in this hospital, they’ve got this many COVID patients, most of those are preventable hospitalizations,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University who sees Paxlovid as a useful tool to treat COVID-19.