So... How was this not discovered 18 months ago? There are plenty of people taking fluvoxamine already, which acts as a natural experiment. After a few thousand hospitalizations, this effect size would have been obvious (ie. March 2020). At that point, a double-blind study could have been run, which (if done in a city with many infections) could have given results within weeks. What bit of health research dropped the…
Wouldn't this sort of "obvious" link require tracking every patients entire history? Couldn't it be lost in other confounding factors? This seems like it would require a lot of good data and then strong analysis chops to pull that pattern out.
The influence of anti-histamine drugs was relatively quickly discovered because everybody expected asthma patients would get worse and the opposite was happening, so this was an obvious thing to examine. But many more drugs may play a role and these are hiding in plain sight - I hope researchers try to organize around it and make more meaningful discoveries.