Keeping our guard up

It is presently evident, that the covid wave in India is plateauing and could well be declining and hopeful ending the pandemic. This had been acknowledged by epidemiologists across India and notably WHO’s director of South- East Asia Poonam Khetrapal Singh on February 5. However the WHO official has cautioned against complacency and said that the country must now focus on reducing the spread of the virus, implement “situation-specific” public health measures and increase the vaccination against the pandemic. Singh also pointed out that the way forward was also to implement situation-specific public health and social measures and increasing vaccine coverage. Both Omicron & Delta variants causing surge in Covid-19 cases was the reason for more cases during the second wave. The third wave happened before it was completely over. After Omicron was identified as the new variant and when covid cases began rising, many generally believed that the surge was due to new variant. Fortunately, even though the Omicron variant spread like wildfire, it was not very deadly as compared to the Delta variant. As most adults were already vaccinated with both the doses, the rate of hospitalization and mortality is quite low in comparison with the second wave. However, a closer scrutiny revealed that fresh covid cases were due to both Delta and Omicron. These two were present in the same environment and were contributing to the surge in Covid cases. Covid cases across India have begun to decline to less than one lakh from the nearly three lakh figure last month. However Dr Sanjeev Kumar, nodal officer of Covid-19 at the AIIMS-Patna, warned that the fourth wave may hit parts of India soon as the number of new cases are declining mainly because people are gradually becoming careless, often ignoring the Covid-19 guidelines. On the other hand, Dr Satish Kumar of Nalanda Medical College Hospital (NMCH) said the positive cases have started declining after January 15 and the pandemic is expected to end within a month. He also warned about the possibility of a fourth wave. To add to concerns, a new and more dangerous variant, NeoCov, has recently been reported, with the expected mortality of one in every three infected people. According to researchers from Wuhan University, Wuhan, China in a report that is yet to be peer-reviewed, a single molecular change in the lab enabled a coronavirus called Neocov to “efficiently infect” human cells using the same pathway that the SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect human cells. It may be reminded that after the second wave began to almost disappear, people by and large, let down their guard and understandably so because they were covid fatigue through two years under the pandemic. With onset of severe cold, many have been advised not to take covid tests if they had any symptoms such as cold, cough or runny nose. These symptoms were indicative of omicron infections and probably it was one factor that had kept people away from being tested and let to suppressing covid figures. There are also many who have got covid for the second time despite having completed the mandatory two covid vaccinations. With government relaxing covid norms and public becoming more careless, the prediction of a fourth wave needs to be taken very seriously.