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Trump Warns 'One Of The Toughest Weeks' Is Ahead, Says To Brace For 'A Lot Of Death'
AtomicPiss
Administrator, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 64,480 
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There remains no solid evidence that the drug is an effective COVID-19 treatment, and medical experts warn that using it for that purpose could exhaust supplies for those who need it.
Other than the fact that every time the drug cocktail is given, the patient recovers....so that.
(I will add that I am disturbed seeing Trump wanting to win ratings with his pressers. Just be the president.)
That's not what I'm hearing.
You can see it with Inslee just in his choice of essential businesses in comparison to other states.
Golf and guns non-essential, weed shops essential. Things the right likes are closed, things the left likes are open.
What about the Kurds with lupus?
Oh, and go fuck yourself.
Can you fuck yourself for me? (smiley face).
I'm going to need another cup of coffee first.
Pearl Harbor and 911 all in one this week. Going to be grim
Unless "they" need to move the goalposts again. Maybe next week. Looking for a second wave. Could be back next winter
Dark grim news.
You do realize that if there were dead bodies overflowing out of hospitals we would actually see it. And it would be grim
No states will have the balls to be the first to get back to work. Everyone will reopen at the same time to avoid being first, which will be needlessly delayed as they will wait for NY/NJ to be ready.
The only study with results published to date (from Marseille) is essentially a case series given its patient selection criteria, its lack of randomization, and lack of blindness.
In the study, they enrolled 26 patients, of which 6 also received azithromycin. The control group was selected from other hospitals in France. This is an issue because the experimental group and control group are not selected from the same population and could have very different underlying confounding variables that could influence the results of the study. Without having the same baseline between groups, it's difficult to say how effective the drug regimen is.
For example, disease severity was not used to match similar patients between the experimental and control group. We don't have information on how critical the patients were from the study, and given that the study was unblinded, it's very possible that people who they thought might be better would receive the drug. Another factor is how long they had the disease or were hospitalized prior to treatment and measurement of the outcomes. Did they receive the drug the 1st day they entered the hospital or on the 10th day? Another factor could be the medical center the patients were at and the amount of other care they may have received. Fortunately, new clinical trials have corrected for these biases in that they're following a set protocol that provides for consistent patient inclusion, randomization, and blinding.
Another issue with the study are the 6 patients who received treatment who were dropped from the final analysis, because they either transferred to the ICU (in which the author was not directing their care anymore) or they were discharged from the hospital. Four of the patients that were transferred to the ICU still were positive prior to their transfer, but because they weren't measured on the 6th day after the inclusion in the study, they were not counted in the final analysis. Two others who were not included in the final analysis that tested negative include a discharge from the hospital and one death.
Lastly, the primary outcome of the study may not be the most clinically relevant. Though clearance of the virus is important, it does not tell us about the condition of the patient and whether their condition is getting worse (transferring to the ICU or death) or better (hospital discharge). Another issue is that they selected viral clearance at day 6, which seems arbitrary and does not account for some of the other temporal issues mentioned earlier. The authors even mention that some people who tested positive at day 6 were negative a few days later and some people who tested negative tested positive days later. Fortunately, studies are underway now that evaluate the drug's effectiveness on clinically meaningful outcomes (hospital status) than a surrogate outcomes (viral clearance).
The study is evidence, but there is still a considerable amount of uncertainty and bias in its design, execution, analysis, and reporting. There's a reason why there are over 20 clinical trials now evaluating these drugs in the setting of COVID, either to confirm or refute the results of this study and to do so with more statistical certainty. Hopefully these studies are able to show that there is some improvement which results in fewer deaths and earlier hospital discharge.
On in vitro trials, they also have some issues in translating those outcomes into real world efficacy. This is the reason why so many drugs in development for any condition (e.g., cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, etc.) are never brought to market. These experimental drugs show enough signs of efficacy during in vitro testing that pharmaceutical manufacturers dump millions into studying the drug, but they ultimately fail in clinical trials because they don't work as expected in humans. Some of the reasons are that the levels used for in vitro testing may be toxic when ingested by humans. The drug molecule might work on the virus but it might also interfere with other proteins in the body that cause side effects. Another is that when the drug is administered, it might not get to the site where the virus is. Or it might get metabolized by the body and turn into a less effective version of the drug when it meets the virus in the body. So, yeah, wait for the other trials to see how well it works.
And our leaders will tell us they saved us while offering no proof