I (and a lot of other people) was really excited about this paper when it originally was released. It appeared to show that a combination of Hydroxychloroquine (an anti-malarial drug that can slow SARS-CoV-2 growth in a test tube) and Azithromycin works wonders in COVID-19 patients. Unfortunately this has led to some people stating that this combination of drugs, or just hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure and has led to shortages of hydroxychloroquine and even one death from someone who thought that they were protecting themselves from COVID-19 by consuming chloroquine phosphate (pool cleaner) but ended up killing themselves https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/health/arizona-coronavirus-chloroquine-death/index.html, there is up to date information on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine at the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/new_info/2020/chloroquine.html. Hydroxychloroquine is an FDA approved drug for certain immune deficiencies, including lupus and now these patients are having trouble getting drugs that they need and work.
It is really hard physically and ethically to do clinical trials to prove that a drug works during a pandemic, but people are trying very hard. So far the data on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19 are inconclusive. The “gold standard” for a clinical trial is a double-blind placebo-controlled trial where neither the patient nor the provider know if the patient is getting the drug or a placebo (a sugar pill, or something similar that has no medicine in it, but is otherwise similar to the medicine). It is also important that a clinical trial has sufficient numbers of people who are as comparable to each other as possible in order for the trial to be statistically significant and sufficiently convincing to be used by medical professionals (which I am not!).
The trial which got all of the press about a week ago has a number of issues. One is that it was an “open label” trial, where all of the patients got to choose if they got drug or not, so they were self-selected and not really comparable to each other. There were also only 6 patients reported in the Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin part of the trial at the end. Apparently at least 1 person in this treatment group died and 5 others left the trial for unclear reasons. The manuscript itself was submitted for peer review (where other, presumably independent, scientists critique the manuscript) one day before it was accepted. Generally peer review takes weeks or more, not a single day. The chief editor of the journal is also an author on the paper, which could be a conflict of interest, as it is the chief editor who decides what gets published or not in the journal. Another group has done a far better job than I commenting on the paper link below.
Take home message: Hydroxychloroquine plus Azithromycin is NOT a wonder drug/treatment yet, and far more trials (many of which are ongoing with both Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine, 20 at last count) are required before it can be show to be effective and used in medical practice, I hope to see them soon. So leave the Hydroxychloroquine for the people who need it, those with lupus and other autoimmune diseases.
(See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A3jiM2FNR8) and https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/chloroquine-and-hydroxychloroquine-current-evidence-for-their-effectiveness-in-treating-covid-19/
https://zenodo.org/record/3725560#.Xn_tVdNKiYU