Meh. No zinc in the study. Again. It's a tricycle missing at east one wheel, and it still goes.
...
The two groups either received HCQ plus ordinary supportive care or just ordinary supportive care. IOW, no azithromycin or anything to counteract/prevent cytokine storm. While HCQ is better understood - treatment should be begun early and with azithromycin and, e.g., zinc - the patients in Belgium were being treated according to guidance given in
mid March. IOW, while we know now that guidance is incomplete and imprecise, the guidance conformed to what was known at the time.
So, yeah. Despite HCQ not being used as properly as we now know it should, it still resulted in significant improvement in patient outcome. The other point of significance is the scale of the study,
thousands of patients received HCQ and
thousands did not.