By the way, I posted to you Dr. Raoult’s selection criteria in his study, I’m still waiting for you to tell me whether you still believe he only chose asymptomatic patients or not, or can we dispense with that canard?
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Finally an “actual paper”. The link I was was an interview with the guy and based on that I didn’t see it. Finally, an article that takes me longer than a few seconds to throw in the trash. I promise I will read it carefully in the morning. My wife is tapping her foot right now. I did glance at the conclusions. I agree there is potential to show viral clearing to decrease progression of the disease to a more sever form. Let me spend some time reading this carefully. As I have pointed out before, to have an effect on a “blue patient” a drug has to have a stunning effect. In my experience shows promise can still be a coin toss or worse in the ICU. Drugs like gentamicin which are highly effective frequently fail in the ICU.
As I have said all along, there were people taking these drugs prior. How did they do?
At this point in my understanding what this paper demonstrates is the role these drugs play may be (may be) is decreasing the hospital length of stay which could reduce the burden on the system by (pulling a number out of my...) as high as 30%. It may have no effect on mortality whatsoever but still be valuable and worth doing in those patients who pass the eligibility for the drug (many won’t, see exclusions for yourself,G6PD Def, Hx of arrhythmia, etc.). So from a sense of “is it worth doing?” The answer may be yes but not for the reasons you think. The “potential” for reducing the mortality is there but you are putting some 3% of the people infected on the drug to prevent 1% or so from dying and the numbers to study that may take a while to accumulate the data.
But at least now we have a good place to start. Put eligible people on the drugs upon admission if they pass the screening. In a clinic like Dr Raoult’s with 75 Isolation beds over the next week or so he should, and will I’m certain, be sharing more data on this. This is the Super Bowl of Medicine, folks.