RNA stands for ribonuclease, which means by its name that it is basically an enzyme that decomposes protein. HIV is RNA virus, and so is COVID19. A good treatment for HIV has been a protease inhibitor; it means that the inhibitor of the protein decomposer has been successful. Therefore, the same inhibitor may work for treatment of COVID19: 3CL protease inhibitor in this case. One study shows that Biktarvy can function as the inhibtor, and has in addition a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibtor: emtricitabine. [1] The medicine aforesaid is cheap and safe, and readily available in Korea. I'm not sure it works but think it is worth trying.
[1] Mahesha Nand, et al, "Virtual screening of anti‑HIV1 compounds against SARS‑CoV‑2: machine learning modeling, chemoinformatics and molecular dynamics simulation based analysis", Scientific Reports, Vol. 10:20397, 2020.
Only in the realm of conventional knowledge, RNA is, of course, an acronym for ribonucleic acid. However, an interview of Sidney Altman, a Nobel laureate in Chemistry, inspired my notion of RNA, as stated in the first sentence above, being an enzyme or, to be more precisely, a catalyst in biochemical reaction. Here is a short transcript of the interview:[2]
Keiser: "...what I'd like to clarify is the conventional wisdom at the time was that RNA was only a carrier of information. That was its function."
Altman: "Absolutely."
Keiser: "And to go against that notion was revolutionary in a way."
Sidney: "Well, first of all, we showed, as I said, that the enzyme, Ribonuclease P, which is what I was working on, had an RNA subunit. So that, in a sense, was the first distinction that we drew. So it meant that the RNA had some function, seemingly had some function other than information. But that's all we knew at that time. Then about 6 years later or 6 or 7 years later, we showed in our lab, one of my postdocs, who was an absolutely brilliant woman, showed that the RNA actually had some catalytic function of its own, and that means that the RNA by itself could carry out this reaction over and over and over without changing the RNA in any way. So that essentially defined what a catalyst is, just as you might define chemically a catalyst as lead, when you added it to gasoline in the old days before lead was outlawed, the lead increased the combustion of gasoline drastically. So in this case, the RNA of the enzyme was very active in cleaving another piece of RNA. So that was the truly revolutionary move, and that really upset a notion that had been in place for perhaps 150 years, well, not 150, maybe 120 years, that was first annunciated by Pasteur when he was the first person to describe what an enzyme was to isolate enzymes."
I add a study that shows how the other elements in Biktarvy other than bictegravir work in the treatment of COVID19. [3]
[2] University of California Television, "Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) - Conversations with History" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBWMLiwRW_c @27:57
[3] Jean-Jacuques Parienti, et al, "Effect of Tenofovir Disoproxil Fumarate and Emtricitabine on nasopharyngeal SARS-CoV-2 viral load burden amongst outpatients with COVID-19: A pilot, randomized, open-label phase 2 trial", E Medical Medicine, Vol. 38, 2021.
