There are many experimental drugs given to patients, do they help or are they making things worse?
Here "help" can be measured as:
- Increased survival
- For each level of breathing support above and including
NIPPV, reducing number of patients that ever reach that level and reducing the duration for which those are required is also a meaningful endpoint (with more data to use). - Decreased duration of hospitalization.
For each criteria there is a separate question about sign and about reaching a clinically meaningful difference. The clinically meaningful differences for the criteria are yet to determined by consulting an expert.
It is theorized that antivirals can be effective only when given early in the disease progression (some people guess that this means roughly < 7 days from symptom onset). So whenever possible estimating the effect of early vs. late treatment with antivirals should be attempted.
As a secondary goal, the strength of the connection between the clinical markers and disease progression is of interest.