Chloroquine is a Potent Inhibitor of SARS-Coronavirus Infection & Spread (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Chloroquine is a Potent Inhibitor of SARS-Coronavirus Infection & Spread (2005)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

19 pointsKhelavaster5 comments

Chloroquine's efficacy in treating COVID-19 was found not to be effective and potentially harmful, right? But was it effective against SARS as the paper suggests?

https://www.henryford.com/news/2020/07/hydro-treatment-study

DETROIT – Treatment with hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate significantly in sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19 – and without heart-related side-effects, according to a new study published by Henry Ford Health System.

In a large-scale retrospective analysis of 2,541 patients hospitalized between March 10 and May 2, 2020 across the system’s six hospitals, the study found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine alone died compared to 26.4% not treated with hydroxychloroquine. None of the patients had documented serious heart abnormalities; however, patients were monitored for a heart condition routinely pointed to as a reason to avoid the drug as a treatment for COVID-19.

The study was published today in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, the peer-reviewed, open-access online publication of the International Society of Infectious Diseases (ISID.org).

Neither your comment nor the summary at the link (I didn't read the actual paper) say anything about whether they adjusted the statistics for plausibly relevant differences in the two populations.

It says the results "require further confirmation in prospective, randomized controlled trials", but surely what we all want to know is whether the non-random assignment of patients to the with/without groups was compensated for at all?

Since those patients also received steroids in addition to hydroxychloroquine, it is fallacious to attribute any outcome to hydroxychloroquine.

This is a poorly done, observational-only study with a major confounding flaw.

The paper says it works as inhibitor. Everybody says it works as inhibitor. Nobody says it works as treatment. But still people refuse to read and translate inhibition as treatment. Guess what, it's not.

Inhibition works by taking it 2-3 weeks prior, not after the infection. This is no treatment, it's prevention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com