The non-experimental study concerns a large number of COVID-19 patients (sample size 368) at Veterans Administration medical centers. These were older men, many with comorbidities. The study is non-experimental because patients weren't randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. Instead, the sicker patients tended to be administered hydroxychloroquine. It is recognized by the authors of this study that the correlation of severity with prescription imparts bias into the sample. The authors reduce (but do not eliminate) this bias through "propensity score adjustment."
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