It’s pretty much axiomatic that the sooner you medically intervene against a disease, the better the outcome.
Now this was a relatively small study afaik, apx 350 patients. I didn’t read the study details just what I heard on TV. So a couple “more” deaths on the drug arm could just be outlier data or abberational data. And certainly incomplete. Of the survivors did they recover faster? Produce antibodies faster? Slow viral load build? Yeah, death is one outcome to look at but it’s not the only one to look at; and there could be other causes (the headline suggests the drug caused the deaths, which seems very unlikely).
As noted, what was the median age of the patients, how far along the disease cycle did they progress before administration of the drug, was it drug monotherapy or did they add AZ and or Zinc? What was the dosing? What underlying risk factors did they have? Among those who passed, other than CV19, what was the cause-in-fact (heart failure? pneumonia? Stroke?). What other medications were they on?
None of that data is included or addressed, hence my lack of confidence in the study design. I did post the link to the study up-thread.
it loads as a pdf
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1.full.pdf
This is why the timeline is important with Trump’s drug.
My prediction is that Actemra is going to be the miracle drug for those in the cytokine hellstorm
Hard to get right now for many Drs.
Drs are leaning on sources and connections to Genentech to try to get it.
I have heard some wild anecdotes on hoops being jumped to get it to patients