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Comment by sipior | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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