Two-thirds of severe Covid-19 cases improved on Gilead drug remdesivir

It’s really hard to know what to make of this data without a control arm. The patient selection becomes key to estimating the effect of on the outcomes, but the patients were not all extremely sick to start, and the patient inclusion criteria is super unclear.

https://emcrit.org/pulmcrit/pulmcrit-eleven-reasons-the-nejm...

Why didn’t they just do a double blind trial?!? This is stats 101 stuff.

How did the people that designed this study get promoted to a position where they could do so much damage?

Sometimes I wonder if the entire coronavirus response this embarrassingly incompetent, or if the news somehow picks the worst of the worst.

As my advisor always used to say. If you didn't include a control, you didn't do an experiment. It's that simple. THe results are promising, but you have to keep in mind what that really means. It means, we haven't proven that it doesn't work. SO there is a chance that it works and we don't know how big that chance is. It also means that we haven't proven that it causes more harm than good. So there is a chance that it does indeed do more harm than good.

Just like every treatment protocol, this will have to be tested properly to see: if it is actually effective, what are the risks, who would this work for, etc.

I view what we’re doing right now as buying time for treatment protocol testing, since right now our treatment is to help the symptoms. Only once we have something, maybe this, that has been testing and shows to decrease the length of time being sick and severity of illness can we go back to our normal lives.

aren't 50% of severe covid-19 cases improving from normal treatment? Would this imply about a 33% improvement over standard care (modulo concerns about patient selection criteria?)