Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #statisticalmethods
Most recents (1)
1/Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is looking worse&worse as an option for care of #COVID19 The best new study offers a *superb* example of a statistical approach to data where treatment wasn't randomly assigned. I'll summarize the finding and "propensity scores" nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
2/In this NY hospital (March 7-April 8), docs were permitted to offer HCQ but didn’t have to. And, the 811 who got HC were sicker than 565 who didn’t. If we compare outcomes with vs without HCQ, it might make HCQ look bad, because of who got it (“confounding by indication”).
3/To address such imbalances, you can do 2 things. Either do a large randomized trial (hard to do fast!), or- as was done here- attempt to analyze in a way that corrects for imbalances. The latter is never as definitive as the former, but it’s faster.
