[tazedsoul]

The article has the number of Ivermectin prescriptions in the last month, but not the number of people seeking emergency care due to Ivermectin. “Clogged up” isn’t quantifiable.

Let’s upperbound an average worst-case situation. If every single person ingested Ivermectin and needed emergency care last month that did, that would be 88000/50 people in need of emergency care per state assuming a uniform distribution of such cases across the US by state, which I know is false but we are just concerned with the order of the problem. Still that’s 1700 people per state, or about 50 people per day per state in need of care. How many hospitals are there per state on average? Oklahoma has ~150, so that’s 50/150 cases per hospital per day. That’s .3 people per hospital per day seeking emergency care for Ivermectin. Does this “clog” the system? Maybe if it’s already overwhelmed by COVID, which it seems to be in Oklahoma.

Of course, this is a back of the envelope approximation, but I’m skeptical that this is the problem it is being presented as.

[pseudo0]

I'm rather skeptical of the scale of this issue, given how it's one doctor making the claim with no stats to back it up, and it plays perfectly into the media's stereotypes of rural Americans. Have a handful of people taken an excessive dose of Ivermectin? Probably. Is it a top 10 or even top 50 cause of hospital admission? I highly doubt it.

[belltaco]

People are eating horse paste meant for horse deworming and ending up with overdoses. They're buying them from vet pharmacies. Prescriptions are harder to overdose because they're meant for human consumption. So your calculations are wrong.

[tazedsoul]

Do we have numbers for ivermectin sales?

[tazedsoul]

This seems to be an anti-ivermectin narrative. Obviously, taking doses meant for horses is foolish. But people are conflating horse dosage ivermectin with human dosage. An anti horse dose narrative is perhaps necessary, but I still don’t see numbers to indicate the scale of that exact problem. The media seems hyper reactive to just about every idea these days. But the real scientific question is whether human dose ivermectin has efficacy in treating COVID. We are sidetracked about a debate about whether people taking horse dosages are foolish or not; this is a red herring. Again, we ought to be concerned with the question of whether a therapeutic dose of ivermectin for COVID exists. That horse doses are bad for people isn’t proof against the entirely different thesis that therapeutic doses exist.