My understanding is that's the hope for Chloroquine and the other drugs being rolled out en-masse this week. They have shown enough promise by various limited trials that we are rolling them out nation-wide to see if they actually do help reduce the severity of the virus.

If they do, then less hospitalization, and less ICU / ventilator needs.

If Chloroquine doesn't end up working, basically we need to find something that does, because that is the only feasible way to get us out of this mess. We have shuttered the economy because the healthcare system can't handle so many people needing hospitalization. The only scalable way around that is to find a treatment that significantly lowers the need for hospitalization.

" The only scalable way around that is to find a treatment that significantly lowers the need for hospitalization."

This isn't quite true.

Taiwan, Singapore and S. Korea have not 'shut-down' their economy, and they have tamed the problem.

Massive and widespread testing, assertive isolation and tracking of individuals who test positive can work on some level.

Combined with some other things like maybe keeping 'big gatherings' or 'social gatherings down', requiring people to wear masks on trains, busses, airplanes - we may be able to reasonably suppress Corona without a medical discovery.

Published literature suggests that surgical masks reduce the amount of escaped virus by 3x. If we can make enough masks, we need everyone to start wearing them. They should be handing them out at grocery stores!

There are enough people with fatty liver, etc that chloroquine can’t be a magic bullet

Hydroxychloroquine is what's actually mentioned in at least some of the stories. It is supposed to be much less hepatotoxic. Though the point that neither may work stands.

At this stage it is totally unclear if Chloroquine will work. Unfortunately. Because, all the work published so far has not been produced through double-blind studies in randomized trials.

My god man, totally unclear?

I bet you could find five or more recent peer reviewed studies on it working quite well.

You realize most science isn’t double blind, right? I’ll grant you thats it a gold standard for long term drug use but saying “totally unclear it will work” is absurd.

And we still do useful work relying on simple correlations, r values, peer review. We have all that now supporting some of these drugs. In a crisis and last resort that seems like plenty.

I'll take that bet.

Here's a recent review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088394412...

They find hundreds of relevant-sounding papers, registered trials, and guidelines, but almost no data beyond one in vitro study to back it up. That one study is promising--and it'll be great to see what the trials show--but the road from "works in a dish" to "drugs for all" is a long, bumpy one at the best of times.

We need to do this right so that if it works, we know that it works, and if it doesn't, we can make informed decisions to do something else.

>You realize most science isn’t double blind, right?

That's nice, but most science isn't reproducible at scale. We need to do a drug trial for SARS-CoV-2 because we need to 1)establish efficacy and 2) establish safety for this drug in this disease. There are a significant amount of adverse drug effects in individual infectious diseases. Jarisch–Herxheimer reaction when treating syphilis, epstein-Barr mononucleosis and penicillin; Reye syndrome with Aspirin and influenza. The list is long here. We want the most vetted research possible because even if the chance of death is less than half a percent, half a percent of what seems like is going to be over a million is going to be in the tens of thousands here.

"Peer reviewed" is a better assurance of the accuracy of the observation. It can't do anything about the fact that evidence for current treatment attempts is purely based on observations that could be the result of hope and the placebo effect.

Furthermore, there is a difference between observations of aggregate numbers, like the number of people on ventilators and their survival rate, and small numbers of uncontrolled drug interventions where there are obvious ways for the data to be deceiving. Not all observed data has the same reliability.

My understanding is that it's part of the official Chinese treatment regimen. That seems like good enough authority to me given they've been through the worst of it so far.