Minimizing cough

I don't know how you're going to fix the coughs when people are talking, but I do have a suggestion for the parts where there are coughs with no one talking. I think if you just drop the audio to 0 like you've done you're going to get noticeable blank spots in the audio -- which would be more weird and undesireable than a cough. I would copy a small piece of audio where there is nothing but "room tone" and past it over the cough. Or maybe you've listened to your audio with headphones when it drops to 0 and there's no problem. Nevemind then.

And next time, if you mic the speaker you shouldn't have too much of a problem if people cough since the mic will mostly pick up the person talking.

I would like to minimize the cough and/or mazimize the talking to make the words more distinguisable.

If you have a female talking and a male coughing, you can try cutting low mids, and boosting the high mids - you would want to duplicate your audio layer and only do this to as short a section as possible (just during the cough) and cut the original out because it will color you audio quite a bit. Obviously reverse for opposite genders.

Tricky, time consuming, and may or may not help. Takes experimenting with the parametric filter to find exactly where you need to cut and boost.

Double click on the audio clip in the timeline. This loads it in the viewer. Zoom in as close as you can on the cough and use keyframing to bring the level down precisely on the very loud areas. You can zoom in way closer than an individual frame and you may be able to mitigate the problem.

Now you don't have to wonder why there is always footage of a microphone at the end of shoots.

If it's that important izotope rx in the write hands can work magic....