just a snippet (its pages long ) from a white paper today from France:
Abstract
Background
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have been found to be efficient on SARS-CoV-2, and reported to be efficient in Chinese COV-19 patients. We evaluate the role of hydroxychloroquine on respiratory viral loads.
Patients and methods
Patients were included in a single arm protocol to receive 600mg of hydroxychloroquine daily and their viral load in nasal swabs was tested daily. Depending on their clinical presentation, azithromycin was added to the treatment. Untreated patients from another center and cases refusing the protocol were included as negative controls. Presence and absence of virus at Day6-post inclusion was considered the end point.
Results
Twenty cases were treated in this study and showed a significant reduction of the viral carriage at D6-post inclusion compared to controls, and much lower average carrying duration than reported of untreated patients in the literature. Azithromycin added to hydroxychloroquine was significantly more efficient for virus elimination.
Conclusion
Hydroxychloroquine is significantly associated with viral load reduction/disappearance in COVID-19 patients and its effect is reinforced by azithromycin.
Key words: 2019-nCoV; SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; hydroxychloroquine; azithomycin; clinical trial
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial
Philippe Gautreta,b$, Jean-Christophe Lagiera,c$, Philippe Parolaa,b, Van Thuan Hoanga,b,d, Line Meddeba, Morgane Mailhea, Barbara Doudiera, Johan Courjone,f,g, Valérie Giordanengoh, Vera Esteves Vieiraa, Hervé Tissot Duponta,c, Stéphane Honoréi,j, Philippe Colsona,c, Eric Chabrièrea,c, Bernard La Scolaa,c, Jean-Marc Rolaina,c, Philippe Brouquia,c, Didier Raoulta,c*.
aIHU-Méditerranée Infection, Marseille, France.
bAix Marseille Univ, IRD, AP-HM, SSA, VITROME, Marseille, France.
cAix Marseille Univ, IRD, APHM, MEPHI, Marseille, France.
dThai Binh University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Thai Binh, Viet Nam
eInfectiologie, Hôpital de l’Archet, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nice, Nice, France
For ethical reasons and because our first results are so significant and evident we decide to share our findings with the medical community, given the urgent need for an effective drug against SARS-CoV-2 in the current pandemic context.
We show here that hydroxychloroquine is efficient in clearing viral nasopharyngeal carriage of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 patients in only three to six days, in most patients. A significant difference was observed between hydroxychloroquine-treated patients and controls starting even on day3 post-inclusion. These results are of great importance because a recent paper has shown that the mean duration of viral shedding in patients suffering from COVID-19 in China was 20 days (even 37 days for the longest duration) [19]
Very recently, a Chinese team published results of a study demonstrating that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine inhibit SARS-CoV-2 in vitro with hydroxychloroquine (EC50=0.72%µM) found to be more potent than chloroquine (EC50=5.47%µM) [14]. These in vitro results corroborate our clinical results. The target values indicated in this paper [14] were reached in our experiments. The safer dose-dependent toxicity profile of hydroxychloroquine in humans, compared to that of chloroquine [13] allows using clinical doses of hydroxychloroquine that will be over its EC50 observed in vitro [14].
Our preliminary results also suggest a synergistic effect of the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Azithromycin has been shown to be active in vitro against Zika and Ebola viruses [20-22] and to prevent severe respiratory tract infections when administrated to patients suffering viral infection [23]. This finding should be further explored to know whether a combination is more effective especially in severe cases.