Early clinical trial shows anti-depressant prevents hospitalization from Covid

The sample size is small but the effect is strong, stronger than you almost ever see for this kind of thing.

(e.g. i suspect a tiny dose of antiviral or synthetic antibody would be effective for prophylaxis or early treatment. By the time somebody is seriously ill they are sick from the cytokine storm and possibly clearing the virus doesnt change the course of the disease.)

To be clear, this isn't saying that any anti-depressant is effective for COVID. It appears to be a unique side-effect of Fluvoxamine.

There are several existing drugs which have been found to have modulatory effects on early COVID infections. The key word here is "early", as most of them only have a significant impact before the infection gets out of control.

Keep in mind that Hydroxychloroquine is one of the existing drugs discovered to have some effect on early infections, but it clearly failed to have much impact on late-stage infections.

The study authors were careful to exclude severe or late-stage infections from their trial to avoid similar failures:

> Participants were community-living, nonhospitalized adults with confirmed severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection, with COVID-19 symptom onset within 7 days and oxygen saturation of 92% or greater.

With so many studies being done on covid (by basically every lab in the world capable of doing so), the self selection biases are especially strong. That is, every study that confirms some statistically significant effect (often with a small sample size) will be published, and all of the corresponding studies which confirm the null hypothesis are buried. So you get a flood of seemingly compelling early evidence for covid effects or treatments, most of which will turn out to be false

No, it's strictly Fluvoxamine as far as we know.

SSRIs aren't all interchangeable, especially when it comes to side effects. Fluvoxamine is very different than other SSRIs because it has significant effects at the sigma-1 receptor. The only other SSRI with significant sigma-1 activity is Sertraline, but it has the opposite effect at sigma-1.

However, it's possible that the anti-COVID properties are unrelated to Fluvoxamine's actions at the serotonin transporter or the sigma-1 receptor. We just don't know.

Several months ago there was a post about vitamin D supposedly being effective in preventing hospitalization. What happened to that idea?