At this time, I recommend against using chloroquine
or hydroxychloroquine to prevent or treat COVID-19 infection. This
recommendation is mostly based on the study published in the Lancet online, May
22, 2020.
Included in this study were 96,032 hospitalized patients
from 671 hospitals who were diagnosed with COVID-19 between Dec 20, 2019, and
April 14, 2020 and met the inclusion criteria for said study. It was convincingly
a large multinational real-world analysis.
The authors (who I agree with), did not observe any benefit
of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine (when used alone or in combination with a
macrolide) on in-hospital outcomes, when initiated early after diagnosis of
COVID-19. Each of the drug regimens of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine alone
or in combination with a macrolide was associated with an increased hazard for
clinically significant occurrence of ventricular arrhythmias and increased risk
of in-hospital death with COVID-19.[1]
[1] M. R. Mehra, S. S. Desai, F. Ruschitzka,
and A. N. Patel, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide
for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis,” Lancet,
vol. 0, no. 0, 2020. Link to study.
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