Covid India great news!

I'd agree with that and add the widespread use of Ivermectin.

It doesn’t.

You’re much more likely seeing the impact of social measures and a population that started taking controlling transmission seriously again after a shock.

We’ve seen this repeated in many countries over the pandemic, including here after Christmas.

It flies up exponentially, and when starved of hosts, it collapses back almost as dramatically. It’s highly transmissible, but not capable of hanging around in the environment for very long, so once the transmission chains are broken, it dies back fast.

India’s vaccination rate still isn’t anywhere near high enough yet to account for it either.

It's not ivermectin lads.

They went into lockdown. Cases went down. Now they're out, let's see what happens.

Ivermectin is an anti-viral and anti-parasitic that works well in both humans and other animals. It is off-patent and cheap which means no pharma company is going to make super profits off it. It's being used in India because it is cheap and effective.

Vaccines have robust data backing their effectiveness against COVID, Ivermectin still doesn't.

There is a reason that drugs get approved in places like India and the EU and USA are having none of it.

It's not your standard anti-vaxxer conspiracy lunacy about big pharma not being interested in anything that doesn't make huge profits. If Ivermectin worked, the first drug company to generate evidence of this would have a multi, multi-billion euro product on their hands overnight.

I don't know how you tally big pharma conspiracy with them leaving so much money on the table. It's Trumpian logic.

Ivermectin is being recommended in India because they were desperate and had no other options. The Indian government doesn't really believe it works. They just had to do SOMETHING. In Europe and USA, we're lucky to have health services and vaccines that India simply doesn't and we don't need to be throwing snake oil at very sick people.

Weren’t they also using cow dung, not sure if they did any scientific tests on it, but they apparently jailed a reported who questioned its use.

I think social distancing restrictions in India couldn't possibly explain it. As you say, people live on top of each other. They dont hug or shake hands as much as Europeans but they do live very close together. They are making great progress with vaccines and there could also be seasonal factors.

The whole "nobody is promoting Ivermectin because it's off patent" doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny when you consider major countries like the UK investigated and re-purposed off patent dexamethasone for covid treatments.

Now I don't know if Ivermectin is an effective prophylactic or not, but it stands or falls on its own merits, not the above argument which has no foundation. Ivermectin as a treatment when investigated was not effective.

The more mundane answer is that efforts at prevention were focused on vaccines, and you'd be a fool to rely on Ivermectin versus vaccines based on presently available information.

If ivermectin works as some propose it does, it would massively reduce transmissibility. However, I suspect that there aren't enough people on it in India for it to make such an impact on the entire country.

BBC's More or Less covered ivermectin and their conclusion was that there is little evidence that it works but that it was a massive system failure that global pharm hasn't properly checked it out by now. They couldn't explain how this system failure occurred. Personally, it's disturbing how supposedly respectable broadsheets like the Guardian are painting it as a right wing idea even now.

There's nothing to suggest it doesn't harm, though.

It has a pretty long list of side effects & contra-indications for something which "does not harm".

I expect the benefits outweight the risks if you have a parasite etc

But that's not the same thing as being safe for continuous use as a prophylactic.

Front line medics in India aren't seeing serious side effects

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/covid-19-with-fewer-side-effects-ivermectin-still-used-widely-in-india-despite-who-recommendation-against-it/article34540312.ece

There's always 'great news' about some obscure medication that's trending on whatever forum somewhere or amongst the GOP. For some reason there are people who are totally anti vaccine / keep giving out about the very successful vaccine programme, yet seem to want to pump everyone full of veterinary medicines.

It was the same with the OMG! OMG! we need Sputnik V a few months ago, despite the fact it was not available in any quantities sufficient to meet the demand and wasn't even approved as its manufacturer hadn't even applied.

It's just whatever reason for claiming there's a coverup of some random household item / drug and a conspiracy theory about whatever it is being 'kept from us' ...

Same pattern - rinse, repeat.

The great news are in the numbers I thought. People get freaked out by absolute numbers like 400k deaths but forget that India has a massive population. They outperform (for want of a better word) any European country by orders of magnitude in terms of cases and deaths and deaths per million and all the rest of it.

Worldometers reports 413,640 deaths from 31,105,209 reported cases. Thats 1.3%, but the dark figure of undetected cases is most likely much much higher. like factor 10 or more. In terms of their population their covid death rate is 0.03%.

Also their vaccination rate is rather low (~12%) and yet their case curve looks like this, basically a reduction by 90% over the last 2 months.

I know 'good news' is relative with regards to covid but in a long line of bad news this is kind of good, no?

Invermectin wouldn't have any effect on transmission and numbers, it's great to see Indian case numbers drop but weird that the invermectin crowd have jumped into this thread to spread disinformation.