Thoughts on Scientific Evidence in the COVID-19 Era

摘要

The number of individuals infected by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is dramatically increasing worldwide, and the SARS-CoV-2-related disease (COVID-19) is spreading broadly over all the continents. Collecting as much experimental and clinical data as possible has become, therefore, a major challenge for the international scientific community in order to promptly provide the most appropriate and effective strategies for the management and the treatment of this disease. So far, most of the evidence includes clinical pictures, complications, and therapies resulting frequently from small, unblinded, non-randomized reports. How much is the scientific value of these observations? Is the scientific evidence enough to drive daily clinical practice? Or should we treat these studies only as hypothesis-generating experiments?