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SoWal Insider
The Henry Ford team wrote that 82% of their patients received hydroxychloroquine within the first 24 hours of admission, and 91% within the first 48 hours of admission.
They wrote that in comparison, a study of patients at 25 New York hospitals started taking the drug "at any time during their hospitalization."
But patients in that New York study, published in May in the Journal of the American Medical Association, started taking hydroxychloroquine on average one day after being hospitalized.
"Maybe there's a little bit of a difference, but it's not like patients in New York were being started on day seven. That's not what happened," said Eli Rosenberg, lead author of the New York study and an associate professor of epidemiology at the University at Albany School of Public Health.
Rosenberg also pointed out that the Detroit paper excluded 267 patients -- nearly 10% of the study population -- who had not yet been discharged from the hospital.
He said this might have skewed the results to make hydroxychloroquine look better than it really was. Those patients might have still been in the hospital because they were very sick, and if they died, excluding them from the study made hydroxychloroquine look like more of a lifesaver than it really was.
