Pudding Mittens wrote:.
We could all use some GOOD news about this, right?
GOOD NEWS BIT #1:
Well, here's a positive thing I failed to mention earlier. You know that French study where hydroxychloriquine and azithromycin together cured 100% of people after 5-6 days?
I mentioned it was hastily done and had many inadequacies (only 6 people got the two-drug combo and were cured, it was non-randomized and non-blinded, etc.)
Those are fairly dim clouds cast over the study, however, if you look at the statistical analysis, things get much brighter. "Significance" is generally agreed to begin when a result is 20-to-1 against chance (meaning there's only a 1 out of 20 probability that it happened randomly and the effect indicated is not real).
This study is 10,000-to-1 against chance. This means the probability of the study's findings being wrong (which would mean that two-drug combo is not effective) is THE SAME as the probability of you walking into a store and buying just a single "Pick 4" lottery ticket (the kind with four digits each from 0-9) and matching the drawn number perfectly.
GOOD NEWS BIT #2:
Remember I mentioned Africa having a very low infection rate, possibly because they use chloroquine / hydroxychloriquine widely for prevention and treatment of malaria?
Turns out it isn't just Africa. Southeast Asia and South America also use the drug widely for the same reason.
Guess who also has almost no COVID-19 cases? Yeah, Southeast Asia and South America. It's not just one data point (Africa) now, it's three, which is a considerably stronger confidence level.
Hence my optimism about the two-drug combo. About 4-5 more days and I suspect we'll be hearing the "wow!" reports coming in from the field, even though the large-scale, tightly-controlled, formalized study's results will be months away. But if so, nobody will care much about the formal study, it'll be "off to the races" with mass deployment for curing and possibly prevention too (given to healthcare workers first, likely, as they're at highest risk).
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I hate to poop on your parade.... but I really think you may want to dial back your optimism a little.
I was reading a critique on that study over the weekend, and there were a few things that stood out. I'm working from memory here, so bear with me.
Apparently the 100% cure rate was not real. If you look at the original study there were more patients entering the study than finishing... that 6 patients that took the drug combo and were 100% cured? Well I guess some of the patients (I can't remember if it was the combo therapy or the hydroxychloroquine patients) "dropped out"... ie died/went to intensive care/left because of nausea?.... Anyway, that was a little bit of a question in the author's method of presenting the data (real easy to present good data if you only consider 100% to be the patients who make it through)
Additionally, their "undetectable" levels in PCR rounds were not the standard. There's apparently an accepted number of PCR rounds one does to show that something is of undetectable levels (don't know if you know this, but in case you don't, PCR is essentially amplification of extracted DNA... ). I don't remember the exact number of rounds they did, but it was maybe 20% less than what's considered standard. I find that odd.
And then on top of all the study questions, there are now doctors stating that combining these two drugs at INCORRECT dosages apparently can lead to some heart issues.
Oh... BTW our idiot of a president of course decided to tweet "HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents) be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE!"
Which has led to a couple people in Africa taking the drug combo at incorrect doses and becoming ill.