People promoting ivermectin keep saying "But what about Uttar Pradesh!!" as if this analysis wasn't truly woeful and totally incorrect
A short thread 1/10
2/10 The claim is pretty simple - Uttar Pradesh uses ivermectin a lot, therefore it's doing well on COVID as opposed to places that don't use ivermectin. Just look at the graphics!
3/10 This is quite transparent nonsense and it's easy to see why. Firstly, Uttar Pradesh officially incorporated ivermectin into treatment protocols and started using it in hospitals in Aug/Sept 2020
4/10 Private use of the drug - people buying it for themselves and taking ivermectin - was probably quite high even before that. So really, our graph should look like this...
5/10 Moreover, Uttar Pradesh's Covid deaths line up very well with the rest of the country, so it's unlikely that the ivermectin protocol of this one state did all that much
6/10 On top of all of this, we know that deaths are undercounted in India, particularly in the poorer states. If we take a plausible undercount ratio of 90% in UP from this paper, the true number of covid cases might be 50-60% of the population medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
7/10 India has also done a pretty excellent job vaccinating people, with UP leading the pack. The vaccination rate is nearly 50% for the state!
8/10 So explaining the dramatic drop in COVID cases/deaths is, it turns out, quite easy:
1. Massive outbreak leading to high rates of previously infected individuals
2. High vaccination rates
9/10 It is also worth noting that the data coming out of UP is very low quality (read the linked paper above for more info), so even the case figures are quite challenging to assess
10/10 To sum up - the current low case rate in Uttar Pradesh:
- cannot possibly be explained by ivermectin use
- may be due to a very large outbreak+vaccines
- there are many unknowns that make it hard to assess
11/10 One minor addition - even using the dates that UP started mass-distributing ivermectin aren't really measures of exposure. We simply do not know how many people in the state took ivermectin at any point in time, which is FUNDAMENTAL for this analysis
12/10 I've noted this elsewhere, but worth adding to the thread that UP also has had a very large public health response including restrictions that are still in place in October. This likely contributed to the dramatic fall in cases economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/utt…
13/10 And, to clarify, because people do love taking things out of context, this tweet should probably read "the dramatic and continued drop" rather than just "the dramatic drop"
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