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Dr Kang said perhaps a quarter of India’s population is still susceptible to the virus. To file.
New Delhi:
Noting that COVID-19 could be heading towards endemicity in India, vaccinologist Dr Gangandeep Kang said today that local outbreaks that will be smaller and spread more widely across the country could add up to form a third pandemic wave, but the scale will not. be like before.
The endemic stage is when a population learns to live with a virus. It is very different from the epidemic stage where the virus invades a population.
In an interview with PTI on the COVID-19 situation in India, Dr Kang said that after the second wave, perhaps a quarter of the country’s population continues to be susceptible to the virus.
“So, will we be able to hit the same numbers and patterns in this quarter that we saw in Wave 2? I think that’s unlikely. What we’ll see are surges. that will be smaller and spread more widely across the Now, if that comes together to form a third wave, it can happen if we have a lot of behavioral changes around festivals, but the scale will not look anything like this. that we’ve seen before, ”she said.
When asked if Covid is heading towards an endemic stage in India, Dr Kang replied: “Yes”.
“When you have something that is not going to go away in the near future, it is heading towards endemicity. At the moment, we are not looking to eradicate or eliminate SARS-CoV2, which means it has to become endemic, “Dr Kang, who is a professor at Christian Medical College, Vellore, said.
“We have a lot of endemic illnesses like the flu, but you can have a pandemic on top of an endemic illness. So, for example, if you get a new variant that completely escapes the immune response, you might have a pandemic again, but that wouldn’t mean that SARS-CoV2 is just a pandemic and has ceased to be. endemic.
“There are both, because one set of variants will do something while another will do something else,” she explained.
Dr Kang stressed the need to develop better vaccines capable of treating new variants of Covid.
“We have designed vaccines based on the ancestral variant of SARS-CoV-2. Is this the best possible vaccine that we can have in terms of quantity, quality and longevity of the immune response? on a newer variant, should we be thinking about combining the two – like one dose with the old variant and one with the new one – what does that mean in terms of the immune response?
“I think these are things we need to think about and we should focus on making the product – new variant-based vaccines, new platform vaccines – and testing them very carefully in clinical trials, so that we can maximize the value that vaccines bring. And we can only do that if we experiment enough with what we have and what we can potentially make, ”she said.
Speaking about how the pandemic has overwhelmed the medical system and affected other diseases, she said what needs to be done is to streamline the approach.
“What we need to do is streamline our approach. What we did at the height of the pandemic was we took people, labs, tests away from the mainstream medical system and spent all of these resources. COVID-19 … we can’t be doing the same thing we did 18 months ago … we have to think that in the future, if we are to increase SARS-CoV2 activity, what will we do us not to lose what we lost this time around, ”she said.
Dr Kang said that in many states the maternal mortality rate has increased because women have not received care, vaccination programs have been affected, people with cancer have not received chemotherapy. , diabetics could not get drugs, the tuberculosis control program, which requires high compliance with therapy, struggled.
“What we need to do is build the resilience of the health system so that it doesn’t waver from damage to damage,” she said.
She said now is the time to rethink the attitude towards testing.
“I think we also need to change what we measure about COVID-19 and should measure what matters – what puts people in hospitals, what puts people at risk of dying, not just the fact that the test is positive. And then another thing to remember is that with any test you can potentially have false positives… so the imperative to understand what the tests are really showing us is more and more important now ”, a- she added.
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