03-27-2020, 11:03 AM
A study from France purporting to show that "hydroxychloroquine treatment is significantly associated with viral load reduction/disappearance in COVID-19 patients and its effect is reinforced by azithromycin" is pretty worthless. (I believe this is the study Trump referred to.) It was not randomized (control and treatment groups were not comparable; the 20 controls were obtained from a different hospital and those who refused to participate in the study), and 6 cases out of 26 cases from the treatment group were lost to follow-up: 3 were transferred to the ICU (none in the control group were), 1 died (none in the control group died), 1 left the hospital, and 1 stopped treatment due to nausea. At least 4 of those should probably be regarded as "treatment failures" but were not included in the analysis. published study