Clinical management of COVID-19: living guideline, June 2025
15 July 2025
| COVID-19: Clinical care
Overview
The COVID-19 Clinical management: living guidance contains the most up-to-date WHO recommendations for the clinical management of people with COVID-19. Providing guidance that is comprehensive and holistic for the optimal care of COVID-19 patients throughout their entire illness is important. The latest version is available in PDF format (via the ‘Download’ button) and via an online platform.
There are two new recommendations about the use of antibiotics which follow from recent meta-analysis of outcomes of patients treated with antibiotics for COVID-19. These are:
- For patients with non-severe COVID-19 and a low clinical suspicion of a concurrent bacterial infection, we recommend no empirical antibiotics.
- For patients with severe COVID-19 and a low clinical suspicion of a concurrent bacterial infection, we suggest no empirical antibiotics.
To view any previous (now outdated) versions of this guideline, please see the links below:
| Version | Date | Link |
| 1 | 27 May 2020 | (accessible as pdf only), was originally published under the title "Clinical management of COVID-19: interim guidance, 27 May 2020". |
| 2 | 25 January 2021 | access via an online platform or as pdf |
| 3 | 23 November 2021 | access via an online platform or as a pdf |
| 4 | 23 June 2022 | access via an online platform or as a pdf |
| 5 | 15 September 2022 | access via an online platform or as a pdf |
| 6 | 13 January 2023 | access via an online platform or as a pdf |
| 7 | 18 August 2023 | access via an online platform or as a pdf |
WHO Team
Communicable Diseases,
Emergency Preparedness (WPE),
Emerging Diseases Clinical Assessment and Response Network,
Guidelines Review Committee,
WHO Headquarters (HQ)
Editors
World Health Organization
Number of pages
149
Copyright
