As much as I want to believe that hydroxychloroquine - azithromycin is useful therapy, what Dr Smith reported in this video was actually not very encouraging.
Here is the math.
About 5% of confirmed cases of Covid19 need ICU so that means 95% never need ICU or intubation (every intubated patient goes to ICU),
Dr Smith says that his study group included 72 patients. While he says that everyone who received 5 days of therapy, 100% did not need intubation. That is great but if you listen carefully, he also says that 20 patients did need intubation but they all had fewer than 5 days of treatment. So 28% of his patient group needed intubation while 72% did not. It does sound like he has a sicker cohort than the average population with 47% diabetic. He was trying to say that some only had 2 days of therapy before needing intubation, suggesting that their disease was already too advanced by the time hydroxychloroquine - azithromycin was started.
Anyway, I would say this still does not really tell me if there is any real effect yet or whether those patients that avoided intubation were going to avoid intubation if they had no treatment at all. This is why we need the randomized control trials.
It is also concerning to me that I have seen many hospitals with hydroxychloroquine already in their covid 19 protocols and not much improvement. I did hear a podcast from an infectious disease doctor at the Mayo clinic who said we will be getting some preliminary results likely next week from a proper study in a few days with multiple arms in the study including remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine.
Mayo Clinic Q&A: How Does SARS-CoV-2 Make People Sick?
