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."

cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/1

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."

Follow

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

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