I see many problems with all the caution around that study:
1/ chloroquine is a very well known cheap drug. There is no new risk associated to using it that doctors arent already aware of.
2/ we do have a lot of statistics now on the outcome of patient not treated with that drug. There's no need for establishing a benchmark. Just proper categorization of existing patient should be enough to compare.
3/ people are oversaturating ICU right now. And as such, it is an emergency situation. We should take the reverse reasoning we usually take : if there's no suscipicion this drug could cause new problems, we should have people massively use it whenever possible and look at the result after 6 days (since that's the time the original study says it takes for the first results to show).
1/ chloroquine is a very well known cheap drug. There is no new risk associated to using it that doctors arent already aware of.
2/ we do have a lot of statistics now on the outcome of patient not treated with that drug. There's no need for establishing a benchmark. Just proper categorization of existing patient should be enough to compare.
3/ people are oversaturating ICU right now. And as such, it is an emergency situation. We should take the reverse reasoning we usually take : if there's no suscipicion this drug could cause new problems, we should have people massively use it whenever possible and look at the result after 6 days (since that's the time the original study says it takes for the first results to show).