A question to the experts here:
What will be the most exciting things to be explored within the next months? What insight could come out of it, which open questions could be answered?
Hints to life on other planets by observing specific spectrums of specific ones? Could certain open questions about the early universe be decided? Or something else?
In my opinion this sounds extremely good. They say that 94 people got covid. We do not know how many of them were from the placebo group and how many were from the vaccinated group. But the wording "was found to be more than 90% effective" probably means that much more than 85 of the covid-patients came from the placebo group. The reason is that they need to be a few standard deviations away from the mean to make such assumptions with high probability. I think probably at most 2 patients of the 94 covid-patients came from the vaccinated group (only then you could make such a statement with high certainty). And that means that probably the vaccine is more than 97% effective. This would be extremely good news. But let's wait for the data.
This study is incredibly significant. If there is not a systematic error or fraud, it just revolutionizes Covid-19 treatment. And the numbers are NOT too small to be statistically relevant:
They took 76 patients coming to their hospital, and randomly assigned them into the calcifediol (Vitamin D) group (probability 2/3) or the non-calcifediol group (probability 1/3). 50 ended up in the calcifediol group, 26 in the non-calcifediol group.
In the end 14 of these 76 patients were going to the ICU. Only 1(!!) came from the large calcifediol group, but 13 from the non-calcifediol group.
Let's just calculate the probability of the event that at most one of the 14 patients, who ended up in the ICU, were randomly assigned into the calcifediol group (despite having a 2/3 chance to be assigned there):
It is (1/3)^14 for the probability that ALL of them were assigned to the non-calcifediol group. Then (1/3)^13 * 2/3, for the probability that the first ICU patient was assigned to the calcifediol, but all others to the non-calcifediol group. Then the same for the second ICU patient. We get the total probability
14 * (1/3)^13 * 2/3 + (1/3)^14 that at most one of the ICU patents was randomly assigned to the calcifediol group (and that is what happened). That is a probability of 1 : 160.000 (!!!). So extremely significant. It means that is mathematically almost impossible that calcifediol did not influence the ICU outcome (provided that there was no other problem in study design as study fraud, or a bias to not bring the calcifediol patients to the ICU or whatever).
Why isn't this getting the attention it should??? The effect is very significant, numbers are definitely not too low to draw conclusions. If you take these numbers seriously, calcifediol treatment lowers mortality by an amount that Covid-19 really becomes comparable to regular flu in mortality. This is a complete revolution! Why isn't it getting more attention?