>>9993555oh shit i got all the numbers all fucked up in that study; it was worded confusingly as shit in the summary, please forgive me for that. this is what i get for trusting the french to be able to write english; the "supplementary" tables are infinitely more useful (and explain, clearly, that the study was not testing for the elimination of symptoms, but a positive or a negative result on a test of some kind. fucking confounding-as-shit summary)
That aside, I have one primary concern here; the *single most relevant discovery of this study*, that being the apparent efficacy of the addition of azithromycin to hydroxychloroquine treatment, is merely called into question, and is not demonstrated to be irrelevant or anything. what this guy says is extremely interesting, because every point that he makes right up until the mention of azithromycin registers as 100% valid; it is *when* he gets to the inclusion of azithromycin where he says some stuff that doesn't seem to make any sense.
>"Leaving aside the obvious problem that using true drugs in such a small trial creates a confounding bias, the number of patients who got azithromycin as well [as hydroxychloroquine], is just six. And that is all that really needs to be said of the subject of azithromycin—..."True drugs? Confounding bias? What? The man JUST made a series of excellent points about the nigh-irrelevancy of a clinical test to the actual well-being of the patient, and now he's only using clinical terms to assert that azithromycin doesn't attenuate the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, as is evident? I understand that the study is flawed in its methods, sure—but for us to simply make the assumption that the the six patients receiving azithromycin treatment were all coincidentally testing negative (despite the lack of immediate, practical significance of a negative test, sure) on the last two days of the trial is statistically improbable. These combined drugs are definitely worthy of more insight.
