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Data show panic and disorganization dominate the study of Covid-19 drugs (statnews.com)
10 points by everybodyknows on July 9, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



This article is great at explaining the questions that I (as a layman) had of why still after many months we don't have much trial data on COVID-19 that we can trust. When I was asking here on HN why the trials are so small and usually don't finish, I got the answer that it's extremely hard to run a clinical trial.

But this article shows that the trials were badly designed for an illness with a large amount of deaths in a small time: they need to be big, and the data collected must be minimal (death/survival), and the opposite was happening.


Some (perhaps many) of these trials weren't so much badly designed as not designed.

When you're overwhelmed by patients and have no good treatment, and have to try something, it's possible to try something experimental and write that up. That's then called a "trial", but it's designed by people who are up to their necks in work.




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