Covid-19 increases medicine sales in self-service stores, study reveals

The sale of medicines with or without a prescription increased with the Covid-19 pandemic in pharmacies that are linked to the National Association of Self-Service and Department Stores (ANTAD).

The executive president of ANTAD, Vicente Yáñez Solloa, said this Tuesday that pharmacy sales, medicines that require or not a prescription, as well as personal care and hygiene items represented 9.5% in 2021, which meant an advance with respect to seen before the pandemic.

In this regard, the manager of Economic Studies of the Association, Juan Pablo Flores, stated: “In 2021 the participation in both pharmacies, OTC, personal care and hygiene, was 9.5% of total sales in 2019, prior to the pandemic the participation was 7.6% of the sale, that is, it has had growth of almost 2 percentage points in the participation of sales”.

If you consider the marketing of pharmacy products, OTC (drugs that are sold without a prescription) and Rx (drugs under medical prescription that require a prescription for sale), before the pandemic it was growing around 9% ”.

He added that “once the pandemic occurred, given nature, it had a growth of 12% in 2020 and in 2021 it had a growth of around 10%, this line has been maintained, let’s say since we did not have the impact of the pandemic in 2020, in 2021 it had a good growth of 10%”.

The opposite occurred with “personal care and hygiene” products, which prior to the pandemic, had growth of between 6% and 7% on average in the year and, obviously, in the pandemic it was one of the most affected lines, the fall was in around 11% in all of 2020, accumulated from January to December 2020 and in 2021 it had a significant recovery of around 17%, this line was affected by the pandemic and recovered by the pandemic”, he explained.