On the Methodological Aspects of the Clinical Trials for COVID-19 Conducted in the First Year of the Pandemic: A Descriptive Analysis.

Abstract

In 2020, the whole planet was plagued by the extremely deadly COVID-19 pandemic. More than 83 million people had been infected with COVID-19 while more than 1.9 million people around the planet had died from this virus in the first year of the pandemic. From the first moment, the medical community started working to deal with this pandemic. For this reason, many clinical trials have been and continue to be conducted to find a safe and efficient cure for the virus. In this paper, we review the 96 clinical trials, registered in the ClinicalTrials.gov database, that had been completed by the end of the first year of the pandemic. Although the clinical trials contained significant heterogeneity in the main methodological features (enrollment, duration, allocation, intervention model, and masking) they seemed to be conducted based on an appropriate methodological basis.