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That's the nonprofit organization dedicated to improving EM care through high quality research and education. The opinions expressed on this podcast are intended for general information and educational purposes only and should not be used to diagnose treat or prevent any medical condition, nor should they be used as a substitute for medical advice from qualified practicing physician. Unless stated otherwise, the opinions expressed by the hosts or guests are made in their individual capacity, not on behalf of the Institute nor medicine cases. A cure for COVID? I feel like we've been through this before. A press release proclaiming a miracle

cure, but the data isn't published. People start prescribing the drug. And by the time the data

comes out, it's too late. Opinions are already formed. So let's talk Coltrane for COVID. The big new trial is the

Cole Corona trial. I will note there was a previous RCT published back in July, and the results were

promising, with fewer people deteriorating on a clinical scale, but it was a small open-labeled trial, so definitely not practice changing.

The design of the Cole Corona trial is great. It's a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled

trial. They were looking at outpatients who they thought were high risk for COVID, so you had to be

at least 40 years of age,

plus one other risk factor, things like obesity or diabetes. And most of these risk factors

make sense to me, but they counted a fever of 38.4 as high risk. So a 41-year-old with normal

vital signs and a fever makes it into this trial. And I'm not sure that makes sense to me.

The majority of patients had COVID confirmed by PCR, but early in the trial, there was a

shortage of tests. So not everybody was tested, and we'll come back to that later.

They compare coltrane, 0.5 milligrams twice a day for three days, and then daily for 27 days, that's right, a full month of

treatment, they compared that to placebo. They had planned to enroll 6,000 patients, but they stopped

...