So here is the paper link:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040758v2.full.pdf
Here are my two issue with this study (bold is mine):
1. "...all received the is the standard treatment (oxygen therapy,
antiviral agents, antibacterial agents, and immunoglobulin, with or without corticosteroids), patients in the HCQ treatment group received additional oral HCQ
(hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets, Shanghai Pharma) 400 mg/d (200 mg/bid) between days 1 and 5 (Figure 1), patients in the control group with the standard treatment only."
With that soup of meds, how on earth are you going to know if the med you are testing is doing anything!
2. I know that the paper points out that the few that got really sick are in the control group, but that is 4 patients out of 62, or 6%. They do say that the age of the patients is 44.7 +/-15 years (~29-60) and they also say: "...There was no significant difference in the age and sex distribution between the two groups of patients..." but they do not say what the ages were or give a variance. IF the significant difference is a mean age of each group, the control group could have easily had the eldest participants balanced by the youngest.
The FOMs for COVID are temperature and cough. For body temperature, the control group recovery time spanned 1.9 to 4.5 days. The test group was 1.8 to 2.6 days. So the test group didn't get better faster, just possibly shorter, but there are no numbers given on how many folks when. IMHO this should be binned data in a histogram. For all we know there could have been a single outlier skewing the control roup to 4.5 days. There is no data given to support the improvement in cough claims.
It seems that this is SUPER preliminary and is still up in the air,
not even remotely an answer.