Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin make SARS-CoV-2 undetectable in French clinical trial. [Credit: Nancy R. Gough, PhD, BioSerendipity, LLC]

UPDATED: A Combination Therapy that Eliminates COVID-19 Virus

Subsequent studies cast doubt on the results of small French Trial that showed exciting results in a treatment for COVID-19.

[UPDATED 25 March 2020 to include more details about the trial and its limitations]

[UPDATED 21 April 2020 to include results from a retrospective analysis of SARS-CoV-2 patients in the US and another from France.]

[UPDATED 9 May 2020 to include results from an observations study of COVID-19 patients in hospitalized in New York City]

9 May 2020 Update: An observational study of 1376 patients hospitalized in New York City found no significant benefit of hydroxychloroquine treatment. The patients receiving hydroxychloroquine were sicker than the other patients. The authors analyzed the data in two ways. First, they compared the 811 patients who received hydroxychloroquine with all 565 who did not. Second, they compared the 811 patients receiving hydroxychloroquine with those patients with similar characteristics (age, sex, race and ethnic group, body mass index, smoking status, various co-occurring conditions (like chronic lung disease, diabetes, cancer, chronic kidney disease, among others), medications, initial vital signs, and initial laboratory test results. This second analysis is referred to as the “propensity-score — matched” analysis, because it matches patients in each group according to how sick they were and what other conditions they had. The endpoints used were either death or intubation.

By just comparing all of the hydroxychloroquine-receiving patients with all of the other patients, the hydroxychloroquine-receiving patients fared worse (32.3% died or were intubated); whereas only 14.9% of the patients that did not received hydroxychloroquine died or were intubated. However, the propensity-score — matched analysis, which accounted for the differences among patients within the groups, found not significant difference between the two groups. Based on these results, the clinical center where this was done removed the suggestion of using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients.

J. Geleris, et al. Observational Study of Hydroxychloroquine in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19. N. Engl. J. Med. 10.1056/NEJMoa2012410 (2020). DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2012410