I haven't seen any specific takedowns of the Uttar-Pradesh data, and I believe this is because almost nobody thinks the data out of India are accurate. India does not have effective healthcare surveillance for COVID-19 and the epidemiology there is widely thought to be inaccurate. Official numbers in India for the most recent surge were 400,000 deaths. Estimates based on excess deaths suggest 4,000,000 is closer to the true number. See here: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/three-new-estimates-indias-all-cause-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic
Even if the data are more reliable than they appear, the public figures don't suggest anything particularly out of the ordinary happened in Uttar Pradesh with regard to death rates. COVID-19 case fatality rates have been rather reliably 1% on average in a variety of places, though of course in some places they are higher and in some places they are lower. In Uttar Pradesh, they have been modestly higher over the course of the pandemic, with 1.71 million cases translating to just over 22,000 deaths in public numbers. Perhaps these are off by an order of magnitude and indeed it's 17 million cases with over 220,000 deaths, but whichever idea is correct, it's still a relationship that shows slightly more than 1% case-fatality rate. That does not strike me as a "success."
And finally, even if there were some kind of unusually low death pattern here--which there doesn't appear to be at all--correlation isn't causation. There are randomized clinical studies of ivermectin in COVID-19 which are ongoing. Those are where we get causal data from, not from speculative claims made by government officials based on public numbers that are widely believed to be inaccurate.
The article sites the person that I've listened to most about this, epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who has blogged quite a lot about ivermectin and its apparent uselessness against COVID-19: https://gidmk.medium.com/
Hi John - Happy Holidays!
My wingnut friend is now pointing out the "success" of ivermectin in India with articles like this: https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-pradesh-government-says-ivermectin-helped-to-keep-deaths-low-7311786/ Are there any good studies of the Uttar Pradesh/India covid response and the results?
I haven't seen any specific takedowns of the Uttar-Pradesh data, and I believe this is because almost nobody thinks the data out of India are accurate. India does not have effective healthcare surveillance for COVID-19 and the epidemiology there is widely thought to be inaccurate. Official numbers in India for the most recent surge were 400,000 deaths. Estimates based on excess deaths suggest 4,000,000 is closer to the true number. See here: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/three-new-estimates-indias-all-cause-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic
Even if the data are more reliable than they appear, the public figures don't suggest anything particularly out of the ordinary happened in Uttar Pradesh with regard to death rates. COVID-19 case fatality rates have been rather reliably 1% on average in a variety of places, though of course in some places they are higher and in some places they are lower. In Uttar Pradesh, they have been modestly higher over the course of the pandemic, with 1.71 million cases translating to just over 22,000 deaths in public numbers. Perhaps these are off by an order of magnitude and indeed it's 17 million cases with over 220,000 deaths, but whichever idea is correct, it's still a relationship that shows slightly more than 1% case-fatality rate. That does not strike me as a "success."
And finally, even if there were some kind of unusually low death pattern here--which there doesn't appear to be at all--correlation isn't causation. There are randomized clinical studies of ivermectin in COVID-19 which are ongoing. Those are where we get causal data from, not from speculative claims made by government officials based on public numbers that are widely believed to be inaccurate.
For some further background reading, I think that this article from Discover Magazine is actually pretty fantastic as a summary of how to respond to this: https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/covid/what-we-know-about-ivermectin-correlation-is-not-causation/
The article sites the person that I've listened to most about this, epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who has blogged quite a lot about ivermectin and its apparent uselessness against COVID-19: https://gidmk.medium.com/
Hopefully this all helps.