Malaria Drug Promoted by Trump Did Not Prevent Covid Infections, Study Finds

This is specifically for post-exposure prophylaxis, which means (but the paper is not yet out, the news came out too early) it does not help you in preventing infection after you've been exposed to an infected person.

Currently the questions on HCQ are two:

- Is it useful to prevent infection? According to the study, the answer is probably "no".

- Is it useful for early treatment of the disease? This is what another UMN trial (completed and under review, AFAICS) plus SOLIDARITY and RECOVERY are trying to find out. So the current answer is "we don't know yet".

EDIT: I've read the paper. The differences between the two groups are very small. There are some limitations highlighted by the authors (some cases were confirmed by symptoms, rather than PCR), but at least in a mostly younger (median age 40 years) population, prophylaxis with HCQ does not seem to be effective to prevent the disease.

Zinc supplementation does not seem to help, but the authors mention that there were confounding factors.

Now, does HCQ actually help with disease treatment? As I wrote before, this is still an unknown. Other trials are needed (and ongoing) to answer this question.