Dr. Steven Smith: Hydroxychloroquine Works; "This is the beginning of the end of coronavirus"

This is not a study with a control group. It's a doctor giving the regimen to his patients and observing the results.

But the results are very encouraging.

How any flu kills you (well, usually) is by causing respiratory arrest. The alevoli which are supposed to let oxygen into your lungs and carbon dioxide out fill up with liquid due to inflammation. This liquid then keeps the lungs from exchanging oxygen -- so you go through the motions of breathing, but you can barely get any oxygen into your blood.

The last step doctors take to save a patient dying of respiratory arrest is to intubate him -- sticking a tube down his throat into his lungs to puff in air. Because most patients will fight against a tube down their throats, they have to be medically paralyzed -- or put into a medically-induced coma.

Obviously, this not a good state to be in. People who are intubated often die. I heard -- don't quote this -- that once you're intubated, the odds that you'll ever come off it are basically fifty-fifty. It's a coin flip as to whether you'll die.

This Dr. Smith did not have a control group, but he suggests that his patients can be divided into two different groups: those who arrived late to treatment and who therefore only got two days or less of hydroxychloroquine, and those who got in earlier and got the five days of hydroxychloroquine treatment he seems to recommend.

Not really an actual control group but there is a difference in treatment.

He says that of the patients he treated, only patients who had been on hydroxychloroquine for two days or less needed intubation. Anyone who was on hydroxychloroquine for five days or more did not need intubation.

He said zero patients getting hydroxycloroquine had to be intubated.

And intubation is really the sign that you have a good chance of dying. If that level of severe respiratory distress can be avoided by a cheap out-of-patent pill, then coronavirus just turns into a nasty but not very lethal flu.

And no one shuts a country down due to Sneezing and Running Nose season. It's only the risk of severe respiratory arrest that makes this scary.*

So he claims -- again, this is observational only; he did not divide his patients into control group and testing group and leave half his patients off the drug -- that based on his son's statistical analysis, it's close to impossible that it could just be random chance that only people who did only had two or fewer days of treatment would get intubated, and that no one getting five or more days of treatment would be intubated.

Not proven -- yet. But as more and more "merely observational" reports come in, the case in favor of hydroxychloroquine gets stronger.

And on the vaccine front: the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine says that might have the vaccine ready.

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists today announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. When tested in mice, the vaccine, delivered through a fingertip-sized patch, produces antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 at quantities thought to be sufficient for neutralizing the virus.

An Israeli firm announced that it was ten days away from a vaccine.

One or more of these groups will nail it.

* Okay I've also heard that coronavirus is also killing via heart attack, but the heart and lungs are interrelated. I have to think that a lack of oxygen will lead to heart attacks, as the heart needs oxygen to work, too.

posted by Ace at 11:53 AM

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