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Non-Political Coronavirus Thread

dartsndeacs said:
I mean there was a reason these two drugs were picked, right? The malarial drug suppresses an over active immune system and the antibacterial drug treats pneumonia.

The point my cousin has is that it’s criminal to not try and test anything that might work, and you seem to not even want to investigate it. Meanwhile he’s got frontline doctors who firmly believe in it, and some data which suggests it may work really well, is cheap, and relatively harmless. He’s not a crazy mouth breather. He’s loud because he thinks liberals with an agenda are helping cause unneccessary death.

None of those clinical trials have combined the two drugs and at least since May that’s been recommended. Why the aversion to even run a clinical trial on it? It’s not like we have a lack of patients.
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Hard to know where to start here...

-Azithromycin treats some bacterial pneumonia - it doesn't treat viral pneumonia. COVID is a virus.
-The drugs were picked because they are inexpensive and readily available throughout the world, so any clinician can prescribe them and pretend to be a COVID expert.
-I have no problem whatsoever with investigating medications for COVID. But these meds have now been investigated thoroughly and show no good signal for benefit, so we should be investigating other options. Additionally, there is no biologic mechanism to think that these drugs should work in the first place, so we have wasted a lot of resources on meds that are unlikely to work.
-Yes, the combination of HCQ and azithromycin has been used in clinical trials. The NEJM study last week looked at HCQ vs HCQ+azith vs placebo.
-HCQ was not politicized by liberals, it was politicized by the president. Again, I have no problem investigating it (which has now been done extensively), but once it's clear there is no effect, then we have to move on, especially since it was unlikely to work in the first place.
 
Rafi said:
Hard to know where to start here...

-Azithromycin treats some bacterial pneumonia - it doesn't treat viral pneumonia. COVID is a virus.
-The drugs were picked because they are inexpensive and readily available throughout the world, so any clinician can prescribe them and pretend to be a COVID expert.
-I have no problem whatsoever with investigating medications for COVID. But these meds have now been investigated thoroughly and show no good signal for benefit, so we should be investigating other options. Additionally, there is no biologic mechanism to think that these drugs should work in the first place, so we have wasted a lot of resources on meds that are unlikely to work.
-Yes, the combination of HCQ and azithromycin has been used in clinical trials. The NEJM study last week looked at HCQ vs HCQ+azith vs placebo.
-HCQ was not politicized by liberals, it was politicized by the president. Again, I have no problem investigating it (which has now been done extensively), but once it's clear there is no effect, then we have to move on, especially since it was unlikely to work in the first place.
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Link to the HCQ + azith vs placebo NEJM study?
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
yeah, they share a bed and both have been home full-time with each other for over a week leading up to the test

one possibility is that they both already had it and that explains my brother's negative test and my SIL's mild symptoms

both had a mystery illness for four or five days back in January or February that could have been COVID


the whole ordeal plays with your head
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Hope all continues to be okay on that front.

I too had a mystery illness in the middle of February (negative for the flu). Fever for five days and the worst I've felt in years.
 
Rafi said:
It's the study we just discussed yesterday! Remember, we discussed the median time from symptom onset to starting a treatment was 7 days? Here it is https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014
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Ah yes, I believe it was you that mentioned only 10% were taking the drugs before being placed in the trial, meanwhile he quoted 50%. Can you link me to where in there those numbers were discussed?
 
why are we back here to HCQ? I have not seen one reputable study has come back saying HCQ helps against C-19. In fact most say is does nothing or can be harmful in a combination of drugs.

stop going backwards people. move fucking on
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Hope all continues to be okay on that front.

I too had a mystery illness in the middle of February (negative for the flu). Fever for five days and the worst I've felt in years.
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yeah my mom had a horrific cough in January, says it's the worst she's ever had and couldn't shake it for a few weeks.
 
warak said:
why are we back here to HCQ? I have not seen one reputable study has come back saying HCQ helps against C-19. In fact most say is does nothing or can be harmful in a combination of drugs.

stop going backwards people. move fucking on
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Therapeutic antibodies are probably the best way to go. There are so few antivirals and the ones that do work don't work that well mostly because you are dealing with something that's not really alive and instead just hijacking all your own cellular pathways. With that said there is still a lot of work being done, an old colleague published this last week.

Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 antiviral drugs through large-scale compound repurposing
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2577-1
 
stugotz said:
Ah yes, I believe it was you that mentioned only 10% were taking the drugs before being placed in the trial, meanwhile he quoted 50%. Can you link me to where in there those numbers were discussed?
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Look at table 1. The investigators wanted to enroll people that were not on either med, to keep the results clean, but many patients were on HCQ and/or azithro. So, they only allowed those that were taking either med for fewer than 24 hours to enroll. About 10% were on HCQ and 30% on azithro - with many likely on both.
 
warak said:
why are we back here to HCQ? I have not seen one reputable study has come back saying HCQ helps against C-19. In fact most say is does nothing or can be harmful in a combination of drugs.

stop going backwards people. move fucking on
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Because political actors are trying to prove Trump right. It’s ridiculous.
 
Rafi said:
Look at table 1. The investigators wanted to enroll people that were not on either med, to keep the results clean, but many patients were on HCQ and/or azithro. So, they only allowed those that were taking either med for fewer than 24 hours to enroll. About 10% were on HCQ and 30% on azithro - with many likely on both.
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Got it. Hard to tell the effects of the previous use of the drugs on this particular study, but I do think you or others posted here are right that you'd see more "noise" than this if this were a "game-changer" in this particular study. However, on the study Connor El posted, it did seem like there was a 15-20% benefit in outcomes, which while isn't a cure, surely when you're talking about 150k deaths and counting is a material number. So it seemed strange to me that the conclusion was "there was no benefit" with hospitalization rates dropping from 30% to 24%, or a death rate dropping from 7.5% to 6%. With enough seemingly smart people thinking it's worth investigating whether administering it earlier than a median of 7 days, the attitude of "why look further" seems silly to me. There's no shortage in people to test, and there doesn't appear to be material harm in doing so other than political harm. The Yale doc indicated there were such studies underway, so I imagine those results will come out starting in September.
 
PhDeac said:
Because political actors are trying to prove Trump right. It’s ridiculous.
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And some non political actors are trying to prove Trump wrong. Also ridiculous. There are some non-political actors that are still interested in HCQ.
 
But there's so much politically at stake you'd think there'd be some studies conducted that could get through peer-review if one exists, so there will be a definitive answer eventually.
 
stugotz said:
Got it. Hard to tell the effects of the previous use of the drugs on this particular study, but I do think you or others posted here are right that you'd see more "noise" than this if this were a "game-changer" in this particular study. However, on the study Connor El posted, it did seem like there was a 15-20% benefit in outcomes, which while isn't a cure, surely when you're talking about 150k deaths and counting is a material number. So it seemed strange to me that the conclusion was "there was no benefit" with hospitalization rates dropping from 30% to 24%, or a death rate dropping from 7.5% to 6%. With enough seemingly smart people thinking it's worth investigating whether administering it earlier than a median of 7 days, the attitude of "why look further" seems silly to me. There's no shortage in people to test, and there doesn't appear to be material harm in doing so other than political harm. The Yale doc indicated there were such studies underway, so I imagine those results will come out starting in September.
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You can't just look at point estimates from studies to assess a degree of benefit. When they say "there was no benefit" it's because the numbers while numerically different are statistically indistinguishable. They could just as easily be reversed and it wouldn't change the conclusion at all.
 
stugotz said:
Got it. Hard to tell the effects of the previous use of the drugs on this particular study, but I do think you or others posted here are right that you'd see more "noise" than this if this were a "game-changer" in this particular study. However, on the study Connor El posted, it did seem like there was a 15-20% benefit in outcomes, which while isn't a cure, surely when you're talking about 150k deaths and counting is a material number. So it seemed strange to me that the conclusion was "there was no benefit" with hospitalization rates dropping from 30% to 24%, or a death rate dropping from 7.5% to 6%. With enough seemingly smart people thinking it's worth investigating whether administering it earlier than a median of 7 days, the attitude of "why look further" seems silly to me. There's no shortage in people to test, and there doesn't appear to be material harm in doing so other than political harm. The Yale doc indicated there were such studies underway, so I imagine those results will come out starting in September.
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Those differences are not statistically significant. They did not even approach statistical significance. This is a pretty basic premise of research. You should read some about power, tests of statistical significance, and p values.
 
Related thought. It's wild to me that basically every high school kid ends up taking algebra 2 and trig, and many end up taking calculus. An pretty much nobody uses that stuff in real life. But did anyone actually take stats in high school? It wasn't even an option for me. Seems way more useful, no?
 
stats was only taught as an AP class at my high school

I'm not quite rj or dv7 level good, but I find most math pretty intuitive and took higher level courses most of my (filthy public) education -- much of stats, however, is very much not intuitive to me and I always have to refresh my memory on the most basic elements of it
 
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