What if 61% of Covid-19 deaths were avoidable based on common sense and early recommendations not adopted?

The news has become so politicized that it is almost impossible to determine the truth of something once it has been sucked into the MSM maelstrom of opinion and ideology.

Hydroxychloroquine is one of those areas. Worldwide early trials seemed to indicate some very strong positive outcomes. Trump indicated he thought there were some promising outcomes to be expected from hydroxychloroquine. Trump having expressed that opinion was sufficient for the mainstream media to pivot immediately to mocking and derision. Of course it can't be effective, look who's endorsing it.

And yet. Hydroxychloroquine was being trialed in many countries far distant from the insularity of the American MSM. And reports kept coming out about strong positive results and sometimes indicating no effects at all.

It didn't help that there seemed markedly little quality control, either on the medical research side or on the mainstream media side. A negative finding from a study with a participant number of 23 would be trumpeted while a positive finding from a study with 23,000 would be denigrated.

Then there was the study which accidentally administered doses nearly three times the maximum recommended which found no positive results and again trumpeted until the error was noted.

Certainly, many of the studies did not specify whether zinc supplement was included which a number of the early studies indicated boosted effectiveness markedly.

So all-in-all, here in the US, it has been hard to tell whether hydroxychloroquine was a potential wonder drug which simply did not pan out when studied under strict research controls or whether there was a real effect being hidden by partisan reporting. But studies kept popping up overseas which seemed to indicate that there was some real effect and it was hard to get a bead on just how strong that effect might be.

From Hydroxychloroquine lowers COVID-19 death rate, Henry Ford Health study finds by Sarah Rahal and Beth LeBlanc.

So its an American study. It comes from Henry Ford Health System which operates forty general medical centers and seven specialized medical facilities in Michigan. Looks like it is also a long established research entity.

A Henry Ford Health System study shows the controversial anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine helps lower the death rate of COVID-19 patients, the Detroit-based health system said Thursday.

Officials with the Michigan health system said the study found the drug “significantly” decreased the death rate of patients involved in the analysis.

The study analyzed 2,541 patients hospitalized among the system’s six hospitals between March 10 and May 2 and found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine died while 26% of those who did not receive the drug died.

Among all patients in the study, there was an overall in-hospital mortality rate of 18%, and many who died had underlying conditions that put them at greater risk, according to Henry Ford Health System. Globally, the mortality rate for hospitalized patients is between 10% and 30%, and it's 58% among those in the intensive care unit or on a ventilator.

“As doctors and scientists, we look to the data for insight,” said Steven Kalkanis, CEO of the Henry Ford Medical Group. “And the data here is clear that there was a benefit to using the drug as a treatment for sick, hospitalized patients.”

The study, published in the International Society of Infectious Disease, found patients did not suffer heart-related side effects from the drug.

Patients with a median age of 64 were among those analyzed, with 51% men and 56% African American. Roughly 82% of the patients began receiving hydroxychloroquine within 24 hours and 91% within 48 hours, a factor Dr. Marcus Zervos identified as a potential key to the medication’s success.

“We attribute our findings that differ from other studies to early treatment, and part of a combination of interventions that were done in supportive care of patients, including careful cardiac monitoring," said Zervos, division head of infectious disease for the health system who conducted the study with epidemiologist Dr. Samia Arshad.

Of course this does not settle the question. We are still in a position where there are countries in the world who swear by hydroxychloroquine and there are others who have determined there is no effect.

But the effect size is what caught my attention in this study. It cut the death rate in half!

One might claim that, extrapolated nationally, it would equate to 65,000 lives having been saved had we been using this from the start. Of course, that's not true. It would depend on how soon it was administered, under what circumstances, etc. But might it have saved some thousands of lives? Even tens of thousands? Possible.

But we still don't know whether the study and its findings would be replicated with strong controls and pre-rgeistration.

All that we do know is that partisanship in the media and in academia has been steering what research gets done and what results are shared. And that it is conceivable that one of the cheapest, easiest, and most effective solutions might have been ignored simply because of who was championing it rather than based on reliable information.

We won't know for a while but it is a sobering consideration.

Playing free with unproven hypotheticals, there is another possible scenario that has at least some plausibility. We know some 40% of our 130,000 deaths have occurred in assisted living facilities and those deaths were a result of intentional public policy in primarily blue states when pressure on hospitals led to the relocation of Covid-19 patients into assisted living facilities. That's 52,000 deaths.

If we had a disciplined early treatment of suspected Covid-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine and zinc supplements, might we have had some material reduction in deaths. Playing loosely with the data, let's assume there is a 35% reduction in deaths rather than 50% as found at Ford. By omitting hydroxychloroquine, by policy we would have facilitated an additional 27,300 deaths.

If the government had elected to not place Covid-19 infected in assisted living facilities and had chosen to administer hydroxychloroquine prophylactically among exposed populations and among the at-risk populations, we might, very hypothetically, be looking at a total death toll of 50,700 rather than 130,000. Bad governance might be said to have killed 79,300 citizens.

All speculation using maximal arguments of unproven facts (yet). But it is a severe cautionary thought in an era when we are constantly exhorted to listen to the experts and trust the government.

I don't disagree with those as generally sound societal maxims but trust is earned and trust is forfeited and obviously we should not trust those whose credentials and expertise have failed to arrive at wise approaches under extreme uncertainty.

There is still so much we clearly don't know. And there are still so many pundits shouting in great certitude.