Great to see a Cochrane review on Covid RCTs. Characteristically, they find "dunno" *
"high risk of bias, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions."
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
Characteristically, people cannot read frequentist results, so you can see rather different interpretations of this null result.
* or in full "We dunno because we're doing tabula rasa frequentism where we pretend we have no evidence besides these small hasty studies."
78 trials in 3 years. Is that a lot?
No in the sense that they weren't large or unbiased enough to get over a NHST bar. (Amazing how little n=600,000 gets you if you don't nail down the design)
No in the sense that millions of QALYs and billions of $ were riding on the results
