Table 3.

Comparison of ORCHID and RECOVERY trials in patients with COVID-19

	ORCHID trial	RECOVERY trial
Design	Explanatory	Pragmatic
Patient population	Patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19	Patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19
Study setting	34 academic medical centres	176 hospitals (range of urban or rural, academic or community hospitals)
Intervention(s)	Hydroxychloroquine	Hydroxychloroquine, corticosteroids, lopinavir–ritonavir, azithromycin, tocilizumab, convalescent plasma
Control	Placebo (blinded)	Usual care (unblinded)
Screening and enrolment	Research team	Treating clinicians
Consent	Research team using seven-page informed consent document	Treating clinicians using one-page consent document
Drug delivery	Investigational pharmacy (placebo-controlled)	Clinical pharmacy
Safety monitoring	Daily assessments by research staff during the intervention period; electrocardiography according to protocol; systematic collection of safety outcomes	Patients monitored as they would be in usual care; no study-specific adverse event monitoring; systematic collection of safety outcomes71
Data collection	Manual collection with follow-up phone calls	Limited to in-hospital outcomes available in electronic health records
Patients enrolled from March 2020 to June 202031, 72 (proportion of reported cases)73, 74	479 patients (1 in 5000 of the 2·2 million cases reported in the USA)	11 874 patients* (1 in 25 of the 300 000 cases reported in the UK)
Results	Hydroxychloroquine is highly unlikely to improve clinical status at 14 days after initiation of treatment	Hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir–ritonavir, azithromycin, and convalescent plasma are highly unlikely to improve mortality; dexamethasone and tocilizumab improve mortality

ORCHID=Outcomes Related to COVID-19 Treated With Hydroxychloroquine Among Inpatients With Symptomatic Disease. RECOVERY=Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy.

^*Enrolment continues in the RECOVERY trial, which had enrolled more than 45 000 patients as of May 31, 2022.