The abstract and table are posted from the latest Didier Raoult article, a summary of their first 1,061 #covid19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.

For anyone who was displeased with prior publications, this is no better. <thread>

https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/pre-prints-ihu/ 

As before, the key is the inclusion criteria:
COVID-19 patients "treated for at least 3 days with the HCQ-AZ combination and a follow-up of at least 9 days".

So, easy to see how patients can be "lost" outside these specific criteria.

It should also be noted only about 1/3rd of their 3,165 patients treated in Marseille met these study criteria for inclusion.
- Were they not treated with HCQ-AZ?
- Get worse before they could be treated for 3 days?
- Discontinued HCQ-AZ before 3 days due to adverse effects?

The authors termed their primary "poor outcome" as "death or transfer to intensive care unit (ICU) or hospitalization for 10 days or more", which was 46 (4.3%) of their cohort.

Of those, 5 have died and another 16 still remain hospitalized.

Those who recovered were young - average age 42.

Those who did not were not - average age 69.2.

A running tally of 0.5% current mortality in this cohort is good - but not light years beyond results seen in Hong Kong or South Korea where extensive testing drives down CFR.

A lot *more* patients, but still no insight into whether this treatment improved their outcomes as compared to best supportive care.

It remains preposterous these authors failed to randomize for rigorous study. We could know definitively by now efficacy and the effect size!

This is bad science and a disservice to world public health.

Any small local advantage in mortality, assuming this is beneficial, is grossly outweighed by failing to reliably inform the treatment of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of patients around the world.



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