Comment on "Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients That Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis"

A major error is found in the article : Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High_Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis, by Harvey Risch, which highlights how the work by Prof. Raoult should be read and considered. Dr. Harvey Risch (1) advocated the use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for the outpatient treatment of patients with coronavirus 19 (COVID-19). To support his case, he cited the mortality calculations from 2 cohorts, one presumably treated by Dr. Zelenko (2) in New York, and the other treated by Million et al.(3) in France. In his article, Dr. Risch made an error in the calculation of the estimated mortality among at-risk patients who were treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (and possibly also zinc). Indeed, in order to prove the supposed superiority of this bitherapy over standard care, Risch posited that based on the observed number of fatalities among at-risk patients in other studies, one would expect 20% of the 1,466 patients in these 2 cohorts to have died (i.e., approximately 293 patients rather than 7), and therefore the bitherapy of hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin is 41 times more efficacious than standard of care.