Efficacy and safety of traditional Chinese medicine combined with routine western medicine for the asymptomatic novel coronavirus disease (COVID–19): A Bayesian network meta-analysis protocol

BACKGROUND: The number of patients infected with novel coronavirus disease (COVID–19) has exceeded 10 million in 2020, and a large proportion of them are asymptomatic. At present, there is still no effective treatment for this disease. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) shows a good therapeutic effect on COVID–19, especially for asymptomatic patients. According to the search results, we found that although there are many studies on COVID–19, there are no studies targeting asymptomatic infections. Therefore, we design a network meta-analysis (NMA) to evaluate the therapeutic effect of TCM on asymptomatic COVID–19. METHODS: We will search Chinese and English databases to collect all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of TCM combined with conventional western medicine or using only TCM to treat asymptomatic COVID–19 from December 2019 to July 2020. Then, two investigators will independently filter the articles, extract data, and evaluate the risk of bias. We will conduct a Bayesian NMA to evaluate the effects of different therapies. All data will be processed by Stata 16.0 and WinBUGS. RESULTS: This study will evaluate the effectiveness of various treatments for asymptomatic COVID–19. The outcome indicators include the time when the nucleic acid turned negative, the proportion of patients with disease progression, changes in laboratory indicators, and the side effects of drugs. CONCLUSION: This analysis will further improve the treatment of asymptomatic COVID–19. INPLASY REGISTRATION NUMBER: INPLASY202070022.