The last few months I have been stumbling onto RCTs conducted in developing countries, with great results in treating Covid-19. The evaluated treatments seem apriori unlikely to generate these great results, e.g. this gargling study from Bangladesh, or this honey+black cumin seeds study from Pakistan, or Bromhexine from Iran all have results that would revolutionary-if-true. FWIW, and on the face of it, none of them can be described as garbage (decent sample size, randomized, p- preregistered for the Pakistani study, etc.)
This question however is not about these particular studies, but which base rate I should be using to evaluate such studies. I am coming up empty with prior instances of clinical trials from developing countries with promising results, good sample sizes but which later turned out to be false. Does anybody know of examples or can recommend search terms?
Thanks for the answer, and I understand where you are coming from. But concluding that "we need to do more studies" is not useful in this case, when most of the future damage of the pandemic will happen in the next few months, and publishing new studies takes close to a year.