A coronavirus drug seems to work. What's next?

News that an experimental drug seems to be the first effective treatment for the new coronavirus has unleashed a flurry of interest from doctors and patients — and questions about how soon it might be available.

Talk turned Thursday to how quickly the federal Food and Drug Administration might act on Gilead Sciences’s remdesivir after preliminary results from a major study found it shortened the recovery time by an average of four days for people hospitalized with COVID-19.

“You do now have a drug that you have proven can actually work on the virus,” the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci told The Associated Press.

“Will it be an overwhelming cure? No, of course not,” Fauci said. But with its use, “you will free up hospital beds, you will take less stress on the health care system.”

No treatment currently is approved for treating the virus, which has killed more than 230,000 people worldwide since it emerged late last year.

When independent experts monitoring the study called with the news that the drug was working, study leader Dr. Andre Kalil of the University of Nebraska said he was “almost speechless" with joy.

Here are some questions about the results and next steps.

Q: How much does the drug help?

A: Remdesivir reduced the time patients were in the hospital by 31% to 11 days on average versus 15 days for those just given usual care, preliminary results of the study found.

The drug also might be reducing deaths, although that’s not certain from the partial results revealed so far.

About 8% of those on the drug died versus 11.6% of the comparison group, but the difference is not large enough for scientists to say for sure that the drug was the reason.

Q: What about folks with milder illness?

A: Remdesivir so far has only been...