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Comment by michael_storm | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, it's pretty hard to conduct a large-scale study in the middle of the largest pandemic in modern history.

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Is it too morbid to joke about it actually being a great time to get a lot of samples for a study?

I mean, that plus Zoom and you're like halfway to a world-wide sample size, more-or-less

On a serious note: I'm extremely grateful for everyone who's working to solve this big and complicated problem, and (like the other poster said) it's entirely reasonable that it's really difficult to get larger studies going.

I don’t believe it. Studying how to effectively treat coronavirus patients is literally the most important problem in the world right now, and I’m sure a lot more than 11 severe cases are being treated with hydrochloroquine.

While your point is a good one, meaningful clinical research is hard enough under normal conditions. Forms, enrollment, protocols, data collection, statistical analysis plans, reporting, etc. It's an entire industry used to operating in scales that often span years for a single meaningful study.

And I agree with that as far as it goes, but I think it reflects the problem - clinical research contains a bunch of hurdles that have nothing to do with uncovering the truth. So in a sudden emergency, where clinical research starts to diverge from the treatment decisions of doctors and the drug supply actions of governments, I'm not going to put much weight on clinical research.

I'd estimate they were commenting on the quality of the results, not critiquing the personal efforts of the researchers.

Is it really in the age of ubiquitous Internet access?

A bit of self-promotion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22787162

In fact, I am impressed, this is not a thing yet.

Why is that?

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