Some of you may be glad that I stopped most of my COVIDposting in the last couple of days. You may be wondering if I at last got sick of it. In fact, I simply got sick. Probably COVID-19, but there's no way to know because in spite of trying hard I couldn't get tested. 1/
Believe me, I tried to get tested. I really did. It doesn't appear to be an option for most people yet, though New York State claims to now be up to 10,000 tests a day. Regardless, I became too ill to safely go to a testing center anyway. 2/
At peak my fever was >103˚F, I had tachycardia (118bpm), respiratory rate of 25 breaths per minute, SpO2 of 94% (I'm normally 98%), coughing, etc. Subjectively I felt really, really bad. I've had a lot of pneumonia in my life and this was gearing up to be a terrible case. 3/
I decided to try an experimental treatment protocol, under medical supervision. It's the one that a French infectious disease research group came up with. See:
mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/upl… 4/
mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/upl… 4/
The study is pretty weak, and they admit it. N=24, open label, non-randomized. However, the results were dramatic. See the attached graph. The azithromycin + hydroxychloroquine group did far better than the group just getting hydroxychloroquine. Controls were worse still. 5/ 
I took the loading doses at 4pm. By 8:30pm my fever was down to 100.7˚F, SpO2 96%, heart rate ~100bpm, headache was resolving, and I felt comfortable enough by 9:00pm or so. to take a much needed shower. 6/
And yes, I'm continuing to recover. Not even vaguely 100% yet but I'm feeling quite optimistic. 7/
Possible hypotheses: 1. I may have had a bacterial infection that the azithromycin helped with unexpectedly fast. 2. I may have been on the point of spontaneous resolution anyway. 3. I may have had some other infection somehow helped by one of the drugs. 8/
4. Insanely powerful placebo effect (maybe I should take sugar pills daily for health reasons?) 5. Maybe I did have COVID-19 and it actually works just as advertised. 9/
I thought I would share this story just in case it is of help to others. I think it's premature to presume that the protocol is actually this good. However, it's clearly worth conducting more and better experiments on it as soon as possible. 10/
We need to know if it actually works, and if it does, what proper dosing is. Hydroxychloroquine isn't that safe; it has a 50 day half life and is semi-toxic. If you take too much, it's not like you wait 12 hours and it's gone. 11/
Another lesson here. I was probably doing a pretty good job of self isolating, and yet it wasn't enough. It was still a good idea, of course, but unless you're on the International Space Station, you have some risk. 12/
Plans of the form "just isolate all the vulnerable people" aren't going to work because you simply can't isolate people well enough when they still depend on the outside world for groceries and the like. Even if you try hard, you can get infected. 13/
Anyway, I hope this was useful, and inspires researchers to take the French paper seriously. And please be careful out there. There's a plague about, and it kills. You shouldn't be out in large groups, like the children I see playing soccer outside my quarantine window. 14/14
