I looked into this a bit with a friend who’s an MD, and it turns out that this paper isn’t very good.
Study not randomized, groups not balanced by disease severity, several treatment-group patients excluded from the data after trial started because they got worse (some went to ICU; one died).
We enrolled 36 out of 42 patients meeting the inclusion criteria in this study that had at least six days of follow-up at the time of the present analysis. A total of 26 patients received hydroxychloroquine and 16 were control patients.
Six hydroxychloroquine-treated patients were lost in follow-up during the survey because of early cessation of treatment. Reasons are as follows: three patients were transferred to intensive care unit, including one transferred on day2 post-inclusion who was PCR-positive on day1, one transferred on day3 post-inclusion who was PCR-positive on days1-2 and one transferred on day4 post-inclusion who was PCR-positive on day1 and day3; one patient died on day3 post inclusion and was PCR-negative on day2; one patient decided to leave the hospital on day3 post-inclusion and was PCR-negative on days1-2; finally, one patient stopped the treatment on day3 post-inclusion because of nausea and was PCR-positive on days1-2-3.
The results presented here are therefore those of 36 patients (20 hydroxychloroquine-treated patients and 16 control patients). None of the control patients was lost in follow-up.
This being said, there is other preliminary data from Asia that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine could hasten recovery, and there were multiple biochemical reasons to suspect it could help which are the reasons it was being used in the first place. I would call the French studies nearly useless to determine actual efficacy, but I am still fairly optimistic they will have at least some positive effect.
I looked into this a bit with a friend who’s an MD, and it turns out that this paper isn’t very good.
Study not randomized, groups not balanced by disease severity, several treatment-group patients excluded from the data after trial started because they got worse (some went to ICU; one died).
From p. 10 of the paper:
That paper is indeed a piece of crap.
This being said, there is other preliminary data from Asia that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine could hasten recovery, and there were multiple biochemical reasons to suspect it could help which are the reasons it was being used in the first place. I would call the French studies nearly useless to determine actual efficacy, but I am still fairly optimistic they will have at least some positive effect.