What worries you the most recently? It's not that it's yang or not. Instead, I discovered that I had Yang and a fever, but I couldn’t buy any antipyretic medicine.
There is a news circulating on the Internet these days, saying that after the peak of the epidemic, the daily demand for ibuprofen in the country will be 400 million tablets. This is still not fully estimated by statistics.
What is this concept? Ibuprofen is an antipyretic and analgesic anti-inflammatory drug , so it has become a "must-have drug" to relieve various uncomfortable symptoms after new coronavirus infection.
However, there are conditions for the use of ibuprofen. The general recommendation is that the body temperature exceeds 38.5 degrees.
is calculated based on the standard of an adult taking two pills a day. This means that 200 million people in the country have a fever exceeding 38.5 degrees every day. Our country has a total population of 1.4 billion, including a large number of children, and the doses used by children are even smaller.
So there are two questions here? 1. Do more than 200 million people in the country really have a fever at the same time every day? 2. Are all these ibuprofen really eaten by people?
Let’s talk about the first question first. Since the announcement of the new ten measures, all provinces in our country have successively entered the ranks of liberalization. However, after liberalization, the infection base in each province is different, so the impact time of the first wave of epidemic peak is also different.
Furthermore, there are vast rural areas where the virus spreads more slowly than in cities and towns. Therefore, it is unlikely that more than 200 million people in the country have a fever at the same time every day! After
infection, the symptoms of different individuals vary greatly. Some people do have persistent high fevers and are in great demand for antipyretics. There are also a large number of people who have a short-term fever, and some may have a body temperature that never exceeds 39 degrees, so they do not necessarily need to use antipyretics.
Therefore, I personally feel that this data is somewhat exaggerated. The actual demand for ibuprofen nationwide is definitely not that big.
But why is it so hard to find antipyretics on the market? my country is a major ibuprofen manufacturing country, and its total production capacity of APIs accounts for about half of the world's. However, from raw materials to finished drugs, this still requires a process, which takes about a month.
Moreover, the demand for ibuprofen in the global market has been relatively stable, and the production capacity of many leading domestic ibuprofen companies is also partially idle. Even if we start to increase production capacity now, it will not be easy to turn it into medicine for the common people.
This is a problem that cannot be solved for the time being, but it will definitely be solved. What is even more critical is the second question we mentioned before. Are all the 400 million ibuprofen digested in the market every day eaten by people?
Clearly clarifying this issue is more critical than clarifying the production capacity of ibuprofen.
At the beginning of the relaxation, experts were almost unanimous in their opinions, saying that after the new coronavirus mutated to or micron , it no longer had much pathogenicity. The vast majority of infections are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and can be treated at home.
Perhaps it is precisely because these experts were too optimistic about the situation and underestimated the virus that our relaxation was too sudden, and we suddenly fully relaxed the situation without any preparation in advance.
I believe many people have experienced the situation of not being able to buy antipyretics when they have a fever.
What’s more, we did not do a good job in supervising the sales prices and sales methods of pharmacies in the early days, and overestimated the fragility of human nature in the face of interests.
When many places are facing the first wave of the epidemic, we can often see a drugstore raising prices, and some people are crazy about hoarding medicinal materials and selling them privately for profit. There is even a joke that a few tablets of antipyretic medicine will be exchanged for an apartment. This is a manifestation of the evil of human nature.
That’s why we believe that the 400 million tablets of ibuprofen consumed across the country a day are not necessarily eaten by people. I am afraid that capital is at work, and hoarding cannot be ruled out.
Whether we underestimate viruses or overestimate human nature, it is just like developing a software. It cannot be perfect from the beginning and needs to be constantly patched and improved.
After some chaos in the early stages of liberalization, various localities have begun to take active actions. On the one hand, they coordinate major pharmaceutical companies to increase production capacity, and on the other hand, they supervise the sales system of pharmacies. Dismantling the medicines and selling them in limited quantities can ensure that most people can buy antipyretics to the greatest extent, and can also effectively prevent some people from taking the opportunity to make money from the "national crisis".
At the same time, we are now also aware that the drug demand in areas with weak medical resources such as towns and rural areas has begun to focus on them.
Now that the epidemic has been fully liberalized, it is unrealistic to advocate a return to the pre-lockdown period. Only by working together and continuing to move forward can we finally achieve victory in the fight against the epidemic.
