The American media would have you believe that hydroxychloroquine and Z-packs are completely ineffective. Are we still in the "we don't know" stage? Is there any conclusive data to show that it helps/hurts/or does nothing in the beginning/middle/end stages of infection?

There are other drugs now that both work and have a large effect (20%). Hydroxychloroquine possible 5% increase in survival rate pales in comparsion. Given it's also poisonous I don't see why you would want to use it.

ReflectedImage says>"There are other drugs now that both work and have a large effect (20%). Hydroxychloroquine possible 5% increase in survival rate pales in comparsion. Given it's also poisonous I don't see why you would want to use it."<

Please name the other drugs that "both work and have a large effect (20%)".

Probably referring to Remdesivir.

Does Remdesivir work?

"DESPITE THE HYPE, GILEAD’S REMDESIVIR WILL DO NOTHING TO END THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC"

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/26/coronavirus-gileand-remd...

FTFA:

>While some patients and their families have spent the past few weeks frantically trying to procure remdesivir, another Covid-19 treatment has been quietly been shown to be more effective. Although neither option appears to be the much-needed cure for Covid-19, a three-drug regimen offered a greater reduction in the time it took patients to recover than remdesivir did. People who took the combination of interferon beta-1b, lopinavir-ritonavir, and ribavirin got better in seven days as opposed to 12 days for those who didn’t take it. Critically, the treatment has another leg up on Gilead’s: It clearly reduced the amount of the coronavirus in patients who took it, according to a study published in The Lancet on May 8.<

This experiment compares vitamin D to no vitamin D, and doesn't say anything about those drugs statistically.

Then why introduce two unknown variables into the study?

The point is they are not variables, but rather constants (everyone got them), and they were not introduced, but standard care at the time.

I suspect you have the wrong idea about how the results of the trial are supposed to be interpreted. The point isn't to compare to results outside the study. You should only compare the intervention group to the control group in the same study.

Because it's unethical to leave people who are sick with Covid-19 untreated, so they all got what were considered possibly effective treatments at the time.

No proper trial has shown any positive effect. At this point "don't know but probably not, and it's not risk-free" is probably a reasonable description.