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Originally Posted by GoodLife
In your comment about the Chinese study with control group, you Implied it didn't mean anything because other drugs were involved. Pretty much every study involves a cocktail of drugs. The difference from the two groups was HCQ, and the HCQ group did better, no deaths, faster improvement.
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In every study both positive and negative I look for confounding factors The referenced
study from China never informs the reader how the other treatments were distributed between the control and drug arms. Most other studies include that information, not all. Your note about no deaths is striking as it would lead the reader to be misled as it implies there were no deaths in the HCQ arm as a difference. I'd gently point out there were no deaths in the control arm either. None of the patients in the study had died in either group. The only significant differences between the treated and the control groups were as listed by the authors:
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Compared with the [17 patients] control group [3.2 (1.3) days], the body temperature recovery time was significantly shortened in the HCQ [22 patients] treatment group [2.2 (0.4) days].
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This means the treated group had one fewer day of fever. The authors did not show the statistical measures used to see if this was significant. Most papers give a p value or similar measure and a confidence interval. There are none in the paper given although the authors state an analysis was done.
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For cough, 15 patients in the control group and 22 patients in the HCQ treatment group had a cough in day 0, The cough remission time was significantly reduced in the HCQ treatment group.
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The authors do not provide the data they measured for this outcome. Perhaps the treated group had more patients on steroids or inhalers.
Because the allocation of the other medications is not given and the authors did not anywhere indicate that other medications were equally distributed between the arms, it is not certain from the results presented whether the HCQ was the only variable between the arms. I believe, you don't, that my presentation of the findings was fair.
A new study just reported, you can start a thread if you like as I'll not be doing it today
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...558v1.full.pdf