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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

I very much doubt that. Certain compounds of zinc are known to help; I bet that's the effect they're seeing.

https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/ful... suggests 66% reduction in mortality with hydroxychloroquine alone and 71% with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Zinc is not mentioned in the paper.

I’ve informally been following testing and it seems like every paper published against hydroxychloroquine is either not peer reviewed, the data is suspect and unavailable, or are promoted by groups with financial interest in another solution.

Assuming that hydroxychloroquine in fact has no benefit, there also seems to be limited evidence that it causes complications and has been widely used without issue until this pandemic. If me or my family were hospitalized with COVID, I would push hard for immediate hydroxychloroquine treatment along with whatever schedule was prescribed assuming no known contraindications.

If tomorrow a new treatment emerged and had consistently repeatable results described in peer reviewed journals, I’d gladly change my strategy. Screw media and political fear mongering. Show me repeatable statistics.

That's a retrospective study which are not very useful. The gold standard RCTs haven't shown usefulness.

Sincerely, is there an example of a HC RCT that hasn’t ultimately been discovered to be junk?

In fact the paper explicitly discusses (p. 14-16) potential synergistic effects between zinc and hydroxychloroquine, and provides references to another study suggesting the same. Care to comment, Doctor?

Based on their "risk stratification requirements" it's unclear whether the majority of "non-HCQ" patients were (d) over 60 with pre-existing conditions or (e) under 60 with no symptoms, as those seem to be the two groups excluded from the study. My initial hypothesis, that the paper doesn't mention once anywhere, would be that they were unable to treat significantly more older people with pre-existing conditions, leading to the obvious result of those people being more likely to die.

That could very well be true. Do you have any data to back up your initial hypothesis?

I looked through their scientific paper and couldn't find any data about the demographics of the declined patients. The only information I can find is the classification of their groups, which seems to exclude the two classes I mentioned above.

If we assume that the majority of "non HCQ" patients were of group (e), young people, then their rate of mortality in this paper would be at least an order of magnitude higher than that of any previous paper, therefor I would expect group (d), old people with complications, to be more likely to have higher representation in their "non HCQ" group.

I didn't conduct this study so I don't have access to the raw data not provided in the paper.

I think it goes Trump bad therefore Hydroxychloroquine bad by association.

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