New Delhi: noted that Covid-19 might lead to endemicity in India, Vaccinologist Dr.
Gangandeep Kang on Monday said local flares that would be smaller and spread wider throughout the country could add to form the third wave of pandemic, but the scale would not be like previously.
The endemic stage is when a population learns life with a virus.
This is very different from the epidemic stage when the virus floods the population.
In an interview with PTI over the Covid-19 situation in India, said Kang after the second wave, maybe a quarter of the country’s population continues to be vulnerable to the virus.
“So we will be able to achieve in the quarter the same number and the same pattern that we see in the second wave? What I think is impossible.
What we will see is a local flare-up that will be smaller and spread more broadly opposite the country.
Now if it will collect to form the third wave, which might occur if we have a lot of behavior changes around the festival, but the scale will not be what we see before, “he said.
Asked whether Covid might be heading to the endemic stage in India, Kang said, “Yes.” “When you have something that won’t go away in the near future, it goes to endemicity.
At present, we don’t see eradicating or eliminating SARS-COV2, which means it must be endemic,” Kang, which.
Is a professor at Christian Medical College, Vellore, said.
“We have many endemic diseases such as influenza, but you can have a layered pandemic on endemic disease.
So for example, if you get a new variant that fully escapes the immune response, you can have a pandemic again but it won’t mean that SARS-COV2 only Pandemic and have stopped endemic.
“There are both, because a set of variants will do something while the others will do something else,” he explained.
Kang emphasizes the need to develop a better vaccine that can deal with the new Covid variant.
“We designed Vaccines based on the ancestral variant of SARS-COV-2.
Is it the best vaccine that we can have in terms of quantity, quality and long life of the immune response? So will it be better for us to have a newer variant vaccine, should we think of combining two – like a dose with a longer variant and one with a new one – what does it mean in terms of immune response? “I think this is the things we have to think about and we must focus on manufacturing products – new variant-based vaccines, new platform vaccines – and test them very carefully in clinical trials, so we can maximize the value brought by the vaccine.
And we can only do that if we experiment enough from what we have and what potentially can we do, “he said.
Talking about how the pandemic flooded the medical system and influenced other diseases, he said what needed to be rationalized the approach.
“What we need to do is rationalize our approach.
What we do during the high pandemic is that we bring people, laboratories, test from ordinary medical systems and devote all these resources to Covid-19 …
we cannot do that The same thing we did 18 months ago …
we need to think that in the future, if we need to increase the activities of SARS-COV2, what we will do so we won’t lose what we pass this time, “he said.
Kang said in many countries, maternal mortality rises because women do not care, affected immunization programs, people with cancer do not get chemotherapy, diabetes cannot get drugs, TB programs, who need high compliance with therapy, fighting.
“What we need to do is build resilience in the health care system so that we are not depressed from damage damage,” he said.
He said time had come to rethink about attitude towards testing.
“I think we also need to change what we measure about Covid-19 and have to measure things – what places people in the hospital, what makes people in the risk of death, not just the fact that the test is positive.
And then, Another thing to remember is that with any test, you have the potential to have false positives …
so it’s very important to understand what tests really show us more importantly and more now, “he added.