Talk:Hydroxychloroquine
A bit of doubt...[edit]
I have a few doubts about this study... Empirical treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for suspected cases of COVID-19 followed-up by telemedicine
They treated unconfirmed cases. At the peak for italy with 30k tests done they had max 6.5k confirmed cases. That's 23.5k people who tested negative. You can't just give drugs to uncofirmed cases. They should have tested.
Furthermore, you have a study where 10-20% of the patients MAY have had Covid-19. Then you partition the "control" and HCQ group by simply making those who refuse treatment as the control.
I'd be very happy if this study was representative of possible treatment outcomes. Now, I'm no medical expert so my opinions are unfortunately not as well informed as I'd like them to be, but the conflicting findings from other studies force me to be atleast a little tentative about this one.The Sqrt-1 talk stalk 05:13, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Another problem...[edit]
This time, it is regarding this... Early Hydroxychloroquine Is Associated with an Increase of Survival in COVID-19 Patients: An Observational Study
The first problem (which is also the most obvious) is that it is not peer reviewed.
The second problem, the (probably) only statistical signings is p = 0.002 is when you look at the deaths as a whole. This could've been because "severe" patients not on HCQ were significantly older than those than were on HCQ. So when you look further into the different groups, only the mild group had statistical significance. However this could've been due to the spread of the age within this mild group as you can see in the graph below. It probably would've been nice if they plotted the points of every patient's age on the graph to give us a better picture. Hence, the study overall isn't robust if you want to justify the recommendation of prescribing HCQ. Especially in mild patients (where this study shown a significant increase in survival) given that there is irreversible chronic cardiotoxicity associated with the use of HCQ.
3, this is a retrospective, not a randomised trial. So it's not really conclusive.
Again, I can be very wrong. The Sqrt-1 talk stalk 05:12, 2 August 2020 (UTC)