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There are probably a lot of people in the 1, 2, and 3 days of treatment who died since they wouldn’t be admitted unless their situation was very serious anyway.

Hmmm. That's worth considering. I haven't found anywhere that this was stated either way, but now I know to look out for it.

What you're saying is that patient X arrives and is treated with the combo. Patient X dies that day, or the next, or the next. Patient X is therefore not counted in this particular statistic as a death because they didn't receive the full course of treatment. Do I have that right?

I'll keep an eye open for that from here out.

Common sense does tell me that the more critical you are when a drug is administered, the less chance it has of working. You can't reasonably expect somebody who is several hours away from death has near as much of a chance that any pill is going to work.

That's why I've sort of bought into the "prescribe immediately after positive confirmation even if symptoms are mild" argument.

Thanks for providing more to consider.

Yes, that is what I am saying and it’s according to the captions (which are in French) on those statistics. They have total number of people treated with the combination, irrespective of the amount of time they were on it, and then the number of people who died who were taking the combination but only if they were taking it for more than 3 days. It’s seriously misleading considering a lot of people are looking at their results.

So they’re showing only 1 person who died taking the combination but that’s because that 1 person was only counted because they took it 4 or more days. They’re not counting the people who died who took it less than 4 days.

In fact, it could be that the people taking this combination died at a higher rate than those at the hospital not taking it since there were 16 total deaths at the hospital but those 16 deaths are not broken down except for saying only 1 person taking the combination for 4 or more day died. Since they’re not breaking it down, it’s entirely possible that there were 16 deaths of people taking the combination and 0 deaths from those not taking it.

Yes, common sense could say that but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to report it since coronavirus effects people differently. If you exclude everyone who dies who was treated with your therapy to make yourself look better it’s at best misleading statistics. And it’s clearly not a couple hours away from death because they’re putting the cutoff at 3 days or less. Lots of people go in with coronavirus okay and died a couple days later.

Also important to note is that France doesn’t distribute patients evenly so it’s also not clear that the people sent to this hospital are the worst patients.

I actually think France is doing a good job with coronavirus and hopefully this particular treatment works out, but they have to be transparent if they want to be taken seriously. The statistics on that website are designed to be misleading.

That's worth considering. I haven't found anywhere that this was stated either way, but now I know to look out for it.

He's not playing games as far as I can tell. He is stating up front his tracking parameters and showing both scenarios right next to each other. How is showing the two data cohorts next to each other "playing games"?

The average length of time in the ICU is 12 days for COVID-19. The average length of time in the ICU for a patient who ends up dying due to COVID-19 is 28 days. So, yes, he is saying that if he gets a patient so far gone that he can't make it 3 days on this treatment (e.g. on the 24th day of stay in ICU), he is not going to count him in his efficacy cohort as having undergone the treatment. That's perfectly fine and it's a common practice by people doing studies so long if that is clear up-front, which it is.

Further, this perfectly coincides with his samples he has shown in his previous studies where the hydroxychloroquine and azythromycin combination does not really begin to do all that better in reducing the virus markers compared to the control group until day 3 where it really begins to take effect.