Take two and call me in the morning

If you knew this, you're one up on me: "Aspirin" is a trademark owned by the Bayer company, a German pharmaceutical firm. So technically, they aren't fooling around when they say "All aspirin are not alike," in that only Bayer aspirin is real aspirin.

Now, you are certainly free to go ahead and buy a bottle of 50 Bayer aspirin for around 5 bucks at your big name drug store if buying the name brand makes you feel better! That's the aspirin's job, anyway, making you feel better. Plus, you'll feel richer if you do like I do and go to the Dollar Tree with your fiver. That's where you get 5 bottles of 24 tablets each, a total of 120 little white pain relievers for that 5 dollars.

The kicker is, no matter what you spend on it, aspirin tablets are acetylsalicylic acid, no matter the brand name. And now these little tiny miracle pills, which I use for everyday pain relief, have a use we didn't suspect until a new study at the University of Maryland School of Medicine dug it up.

They found that  COVID-19 patients taking one daily low-dose aspirin (many people pop one a day to protect against cardiovascular disease) are also significantly lowering the chance of death and complications from coronavirus.

For real, while the world chases after expensive cures and palliatives and vaccines, it turns out that an aspirin makes a Coronavirus patient 50% less likely to pass away in the hospital, and much less likely to wind up on a ventilator in the ICU.

Research says that the COVID tends to cause blood clots, and aspirin is excellent for that!

Dr. Jonathan Chow,  Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the U of M Med School, says, “When you have a disease like COVID that leads to increased formation of blood clots, and then you have a medication like aspirin which thins your blood and prevents those blood clots from forming, it makes clinical sense that it would work.” 

He studied the records of 400 patients this spring and summer.

But! although this would mean that aspirin would be the first over-the-counter drug to reduce mortality in COVID patients, Dr Chow says don't go running out and starting a self-prescribed aspirin regimen.

“That is not what we are suggesting,” Dr. Chow said. “We advise that patients go to their primary care doctor because they are the ones that are qualified to determine the risks and benefits of this drug.”

Doctors are optimistic, but they still need to do a "randomized control trial" to get final approval.

But as my personal physician, Dr Pepper, said on more than one occasion, "It can't hurt."