Covid-19 patients Dr. Neil Hecht and his wife, Mindy Cross, at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, in Tarzana, California. | Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images

More treatments are available for Covid-19 as hospitalizations spike, but some drugs are sitting on the shelves unused.

As record daily Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths this month in the US have pushed the pandemic to new crisis levels, senior government health officials have lamented that many patients are not getting the drugs — including monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, and corticosteroids — available to treat the disease, leaving many doses unused.

There are still questions about how well many of these drugs work, and with the new, potentially more contagious variants of the virus that causes Covid-19 now spreading, a few of these therapies could prove even less effective.

But after some stumbles earlier with drugs