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An experimental antiviral drug is the latest coronavirus treatment being touted by the Donald Trump White House.
Anthony Fauci, one of America's most visible public health officials during the pandemic, hails it as "highly significant".
Mr Trump says he wants the US Food and Drug Administration to approve the drug "as quickly as they can".
So is it any different from the other drugs Mr Trump mentioned before? Or the ones being tested around the world?
Here's what you need to know.
The drug is called remdesivir. It's not a vaccine
ABC Health reported last week that the drug is part of several used to treat HIV and hepatitis C, and it targets an enzyme that the viruses use to copy their genetic code.
The drug is made by American pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences.
It has shown promise in the lab for treating SARS and MERS in the past.
The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has been running a large randomised trial with patients hospitalised with COVID-19 and lung complications.
Preliminary results released today show patients recovered 31 per cent faster with remdesivir than with a placebo.
In the 1,063-patient trial, the time it took for half the patients to recover was 11 days with remdesivir versus 15 days for patients in the placebo group.
The data also suggested a possible survival benefit with remdesivir, although the difference was not statistically significant, meaning it might have been due to chance and not Gilead's drug.
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Talking about the preliminary results, Dr Fauci likened it to a moment in 1986 "when we were struggling for drugs for HIV and we had nothing."
The trial's final results will likely not be known until sometime next month.
A separate trial looked at the length of treatment
In the study, most patients who received the five-day regimen were considered "improved" after 10 days. Those who received a 10-day course of therapy showed improvement after 11 days.
After two weeks, more than half the patients in both groups had been discharged from the hospital, and 64.5 per cent in the five-day treatment group and 53.8 per cent in the 10-day treatment group had recovered.
Data from the study also suggested that starting remdesivir therapy sooner after symptoms develop might help patients with severe COVID-19 get out of the hospital faster than those who began therapy later in the course of the illness.
The data is important because if remdesivir is deemed to be beneficial, there will be more of it to go around. It could also lessen the eventual cost of treatment.
Gilead Chief Medical Officer Merdad Parsey said in a statement that a five-day regimen, "could significantly expand the number of patients who could be treated with our current supply of remdesivir."
This isn't the only time remdesivir has been studied
It was also used in a randomised study of adults hospitalised for severe COVID-19 in Wuhan, China.
In that trial, the 158 patients who received remdesivir did not improve any faster than the 79 patients in a control group who received a placebo. The drug also failed to lower the amount of virus in the body or the risk of death.
However, because the outbreak in China was brought under control, researchers had trouble enrolling enough patients in their trial to produce statistically significant data, so the results were not conclusive.
The study report underwent peer review before it was published in The Lancet.
US experts have also been quick to urge caution
"We have these three studies coming out on the same day and they're all different," said Holly Fernandez Lynch, an assistant professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the studies.
"We have the NIAID results going one direction. We have the China results going another direction. Then we've got this five- versus 10-day trial that can't be a tie-breaker because it's not controlled.
Lawrence K Altman, global fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington, DC, was not ready to celebrate the preliminary findings.
The new data "offers a glimmer of hope" that remdesivir has an effect against COVID-19, but "more scientific analysis is needed", comparing them to other studies of the drug that have shown mixed results," he said in a statement.
"I want them to go as quickly as they can," Mr Trump said, when asked if he would like the FDA to grant emergency use authorization for remdesivir.
The US Food and Drug Administration said it had been in discussions with Gilead about making remdesivir available to patients as quickly as possible, but the agency declined to comment on any plans to grant the drug regulatory approval.
AP/Reuters