The desperately ill patients who deluged the emergency room at Detroit Medical Center in March and April exhibited the telltale symptoms of the coronavirus: high fevers and infection-riddled lungs that left them gasping for air.

With few treatment options, doctors turned to a familiar intervention: broad-spectrum antibiotics, the shot-in-the-dark medications often used against bacterial infections that cannot be immediately identified. They knew antibiotics are not effective against viruses, but they were desperate, and they feared the patients could be vulnerable to life-threatening secondary bacterial infections as well…

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