The results we have been seeing with hydroxychloroquine are mixed at best. I suspect the answer when we find it will involve a cocktail of drugs not a single agent. My daughter is in an institution where they are studying multiple agents and so far they are not that impressed with hydroxychloroquine in the severely ill. Maybe it’s use will be in the less I’ll. Likely this will require a phased approach. The real issue is 80 + percent of people will do well with no treatment whatsoever. We need to be able to identify those folks so we can concentrate on treating the ones that won’t do well
RE: where they are studying multiple agents and so far they are not that impressed with hydroxychloroquine in the severely ill. Maybe it’s use will be in the less I’ll.
If you look at the studies by Dr. Diduer Raoult in Marseilles on over 100 patients and the nearly 800 cases treated by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko in upstate New York, you will understand what Hydroxychloroquine is most effective at.
It is best used in conjunction with Azithromycin and Zinc and at the earlier stages of CoVid-19 illness as soon as symptoms like fever, cough, etc. are manifested.
When you administer these drug combo, it SHORTENS the patient’s time of stay in the hospital by several days and relieves the burden of hospitals. In other words you must administer them as soon as you can, not wait till the patient is so severely ill that he needs to be intubated. It does wonders for patients at the earlier stages of the disease nearly 99% of the time, preventing further disease progression.
What HCQ has NOT been show to be impressive, are for those whose lungs have been destroyed by the virus to a point where they need to be on ventilator.
There are cases where such patients have been saved and many have been posted here in FR, but the efficacy on patients at this later stage is not well established.
It remains to be seen if Remdesivir will do any better for later stage Covid-19 patients.
The reason that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) does not help advanced victims of the virus is the nature of its action. HCQ prevents entry of the virus through the ACE-2 receptor into the cell. Once in the cell, the virus hijacks the cell’s biochemical machinery to replicate more viruses. Several of these replicated viruses erupt through the cell walls, causing great damage, which triggers a reaction that causes major consequences.
So, you have to prevent the virus from getting into the alveoli cells as soon as possible to prevent the replication process and the growth of the viral population. If not stopped soon enough, so much damage is triggered when the immune response really creates havoc.