Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19

Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by darkerside on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:32AM (#29022409)

N = 1500

One sample had 79-86 out of 750 hospitalized, and the other had 117-123 out of 750.

Does that seem sufficient to demonstrate statistical significance?

Edit: found the actual numbers in the study

79 [11%] of 741 vs 119 [16%] of 756

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by _3u10 on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:01AM (#29022554)

I ran it through an AB test significance calculator using the upper bound for each.

p value was 0.9972 and the power was 92.40% it's a significant result.

"Variant B’s conversion rate (11.47%) was 30.08% lower than variant A’s conversion rate (16.40%). You can be 99% confident that variant B will perform worse than variant A."

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by Jabbles on Thursday October 28, 2021 @06:22AM (#29024302)

You can be 99% confident

To be more precise without being too formal:

If there truly were no difference between them, you could be 99% confident that you would not get a result like this.

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by darkerside on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:03AM (#29022563)

> When the DSMC met on Aug 5, 2021, it recommended that the TOGETHER trial stop randomly assigning patients to the fluvoxamine group, as this comparison had met the prespecified superiority criterion for the primary endpoint (prespecified superiority threshold 97·6%).

That seems problematic. Did they stop the study because they had achieved statistical significance?

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by scarmig on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:28AM (#29022700)

Another issue is that they were testing multiple drugs, none of which had a statistically significant effect. Classic p hacking.

https://xkcd.com/882/

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by scotty79 on Thursday October 28, 2021 @05:24AM (#29024019)

Assesing 7 promising substances to determine which one if any does anything and getting 30% effect on one and no effect on the rest is p-hacking?

Is science allowed to research only one substance for specific purpose at any time to sufficiently avoid p-hacking for you?

Also if I read correctly they got >0.60 not >0.05

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by SkittyDog on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:37AM (#29022426)

Yes, as a matter of fact, it does demonstrate statistical significance.

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by darkerside on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:39AM (#29022442)

For what minimum detectable effect?

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by goldemerald on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:56AM (#29022855)

You'd be interested in learning about the origin and application of Chi-Squared tests (or Fisher's exact test). Detecting changes in population means, and making sure those changes aren't just random noise, is quite straightforward and can be done by hand.

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by SkittyDog on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:07AM (#29022910)

It won't be possible for me to explain the answer to your satisfaction, if you lack at least a basic education in probability & statistics. Maybe Khan Academy has an intro level course, or a "Stats for Humanities" variant that can help you get started.

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by novaRom on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:31AM (#29022707)

I wish every news media to show original numbers always, not percentage.

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by ekianjo on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:53AM (#29022515)

Most drugs get approved with less strong effect than this

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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by darkerside on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:58AM (#29022538)

Well, of course they do. There's a terrific market for pharmaceuticals.

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