There is a possible cure for Covid-19 that is getting only limited attention, possibly because the government does not want to raise false hopes. I attached a chart that was published 4 days ago by a prestigious set of medical scientists in the prestigious International journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

This chart shows the results of a controlled test of medications hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The bottom curve (green) is the most exciting one. When these medicines were used together, 8 seriously infected patients showed no presence of the coronavirus after 5 days. The upper curve is the controlled group.

The entire paper can be found at this link: cover19 treatment paper

Even better, these medicines have been in common and extensive use for other illnesses, particularly malaria, and thus have only known and well-established side effects.

Anthony Fauci is currently trying to determine whether to approve use of these medications for coronavirus. Trump seems to be pushing him to do that. It requires FDA approval. Right now, if you have covid-19, your local physician can prescribe these drugs, but doing so is “off label”, that is, they are FDA approved drugs but not for this purpose. I think (I’m not sure) that this leaves the medical doctor open to being sued.

Fauci expressed in his morning briefing that more tests are necessary. From a statistics point of view, that is not true. Eight people were cured in 5 days, while only one person in the control group spontaneously cured. The likelihood of that happening by chance are less than 1%. Larger groups are not needed to demonstrate this efficacy. “Small numbers” can be a valid criticism for marginal results, but these results are not marginal. The positron was discovered with 1 event; only 1 positron was seen, but it was enough. Anderson got the Nobel Prize for his one event. If you have one positron, that is good enough to show it exists. Small numbers do not necessarily imply weak statistics. I hope that Dr. Fauci understand that.

Part of the holdback, I suspect, is the terrible experience of the early release of a medicine called thalidomide in the 1950s that caused horrible congenital malformations in babies. Ever since this happened, the medical community has exercised enormous caution before approving a new drug. But the disruption to the world livelihood is so severe, that I believe the thalidomide cautions are not called for. Extreme caution may be inappropriate when the alternative consequences are extreme disruption.

Anthony Fauci certainly knows an enormous amount about biomedicine that I don’t know. But I worry that he doesn’t understand statistics as well as I do. The published paper shows extremely significant statistics, despite the small numbers tested.

I concur with the conclusions published in the cover19 treatment paper, in which the authors state:

“We therefore recommend that COVID-19 patients be treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to cure their infection and to limit the transmission of the virus to other people in order to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the world.”

I am optimistic by nature, perhaps by choice, so take what I say with some degree of caution. I see a path in which we can be largely rid of the coronavirus scourge in weeks rather than in months or years.