I promised Goodlife I would post a separate thread for each study, and I apologize for now breaking my promise.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...523v1.full.pdf
This is another positive drug result. This is again from the Wuhan area of China. There are lots of issues with patients included vs excluded. Again this is not yet published nor Peer reviewed.
The authors looked at records of 504 patients in 3 hospitals, more than 1/2 from Wuhan Pulmonary Hospital. They only included patients who had been discharged or died. They checked to see which patients had been treated with several anti-viral meds. The primary question was did any anti-viral or combination of anti-virals decrease the death rate or increase improvement of the size of pneumonia on a chest CT.
They looked at conditions that increased predicted poor outcome such as age, lower oxygen on admission, bigger pneumonia on admission and adjusted for those.
Their major finding was that those 257 of 504 who received arbidol had a significantly decreased death rate and a significantly improved pneumonia resolution. A second drug, oseltamivir, which was given to 66 of 504, when given with arbidol seemed to provide additional improvement but when given on its own did not make a significant difference. Oseltamivir treats influenza but has failed in previous studies to treat COVID. The authors offer that they did not know if their patients also had influenza which could explain how oseltamivir showed some benefit.
The patient records were for those with a final outcome, home or died, admitted between Dec 13 and March 21. Of interest to me is that in this hotbed of COVID the clinicians only gave HCQ or CQ to 7 of the 504 patients.
The authors do not state whether Arbidol was used at the same frequency at the beginning thru the end of the study period. If they were using it more in more recent weeks, a better survival rate could represent the additional experience of the hospital in management of COVID with other supportive therapies.
The benefit of Arbidol was robust
"The mortality was 7.00% among patients who took Arbidol vs. 24.70% among patients who did not. The odds ratio (OR) was 0.230 (95% confidence interval (CI), 0.124 to 0.411) favoring Arbdiol"