I read alot about this drug. It is pretty safe if you don’t have severe heart disease and/or kidney disease. Even with those issues, you can give a modified dose and monitor for heart arrhythmia. The heart arrhythmia that HCQ occassionally causes can be countered by intravenous magnesium. I don’t know why magnesium supplementation isn’t standard with HCQ as most people that suffer this particular arrhythmia are magnesium deficient. Anyway, HCQ was already known to work well on sars and mers if given early in the viral illness. So they could have saved millions instead of sending people home to get sicker and sicker until they had lethal amounts of virus in their bodies. The viral replication phase is strongest in the first 5 days of symptoms. That is where an antiviral has the ability to be very effective. Once the viral load is high it doesn’t matter too much if you kill off all the virus, because the spike proteins will kill you regardless of being attached to a living virus. I am more favorable toward ivermectin but I think HCQ might be used as an adjunct in some cases and will also work well as a prophylactic if dosed properly.