How many days from when someone 65 or older first has symptoms till they end up in the ICU?
How many of them are feeling ill enough to bother calling their primary care doctor first before ending up in the ER?
How many people with mild cases call their primary care doctors before they need to go to the ER and then in the next few days progress to going to the ER?
There are just so many questions here that Zelenko does not address and why without a proper study his results are hard to make heads or tails out of.
If lack of oxygen occurs sometime between the 5th-8th day from first symptoms and that is when most go to the ER, it raises a very significant question, by what day of symptoms do people typically consult a doctor. I suspect that the first few days people don’t worry and then when it progresses or remains about a week they finally call their doctor (in numerous of Zelenko’s cases where they details the case history there have been symptoms for 4+ days as reported by the patient). But if that is the case, then by the time people call their doctor, if they are not being told to get to the ER, they are most likely not in the cohort that will ever go to the ER.
Further, when you look at actual cases Dr. Zelenko put out, there is a significant question as to what percent of his cases are not actually COVID-19. Recall he is treating almost anyone over 60 with symptoms of a cold, it is only those under 60 that have to present more serious symptoms to be treated.
Basically, if he treated about 400 patients with his treatment (while he had over a 1,000 patients, he only treated the ones over 60 or those younger with stronger signs of COVID-19, which was closer to 400), and 50% of them actually don’t have COVID-19 (whatever data he had from KJ does not necessarily extrapolate to the general population, hence his conclusions that people likely have COVID-19 are questionable), that means he only treated 200 patients with COVID-19. If the majority of the cases that result in death already went to the ER before they call him, then perhaps it is equivalent to treating 50 or so older patients. If 5% of these patients are expected to die, well that brings us to 2-3 deaths. Well I think he said 2 patients died…
Play with the numbers however you like (I acknowledge my numbers are likely off, but without better data, kind of hard to know exactly how), but without an proper study here, it does not take much to argue his results are anecdotal.
Any family doctors here, who get calls from patients over 60 with COVID-19 symptoms (not just confirmed tests) before you have to recommend they go to the ER? What percent of those patients eventually go on to being intubated or dying? That would perhaps help make some sense out of Zelenko’s data. Not saying that is enough by itself, but maybe it can tell us if his numbers are within what we would expect or they are truly off-the-chart and worthy of consideration.
Look, I want his treatment to work and if someone was sick with this would be open to trying this treatment, however the science matters. If this does not actually work, then we need to focus on other solutions. If it does work then we can reopen the country. You can’t make these decisions just based on his anecdotal results.