“Much safer now”: Has India overcome the worst of the COVID pandemic? | Coronavirus pandemic News

New Delhi, India – On Tuesday, India reported 7,579 coronavirus cases – the lowest increase in 543 days, despite heavy festival collections in recent weeks.

“Also [Hindu festival of] Diwali, we do not see a rise, ”said Dr. MD Gupte, former director of the National Institute of Epidemiology, in media reports, attributing the presence of antibodies to a large majority of Indians through natural infection.

“I think we’re much safer now,” Gupt said.

According to government surveys, almost 70% of Indians were naturally infected in July, following a rise in infections and deaths. second wild wave in April and May.

In a statement last week, the health ministry said active cases accounted for less than one percent of the total, the lowest since March 2020.

Although India is emerging from its holiday season and is currently suffering from raging air pollution and falling temperatures – believed to be the optimal conditions for the rise of coronavirus infections – the country seems to have avoided another deadly wave.

In the last 21 weeks, India has registered less than 50,000 cases a day. Since the second week of October, it has fallen below 20,000, far from the second deadly wave in April and May this year, with more than 400,000 cases a day.

Government and health experts he was afraid of a third wave of the virus, in August and September the media warned that the waves would peak in October or November.

One such report referred to the National Institute for Disaster Management (NIDM), under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of India, reporting a third wave in October. The report, published in mid-August and submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office, cited government experts and organizations as reporting an immediate wave.

Among those mentioned in the report was K VijayRaghavan, the government’s chief scientific adviser, who at a press conference in May 2021 said the third wave of COVID-19 was “inevitable” and that children would be at greater risk.

The report highlighted possible scenarios predicted by the Indian Institute of Technology – Kanpur, one of India’s leading state institutions, whose study predicted more than 300,000 coronavirus cases a day – lower than second wave peaks – if there were no reductions in October. place.

With stringent interventions, a peak of more than 200,000 a day was forecast for the end of October.

However, as no such increase can be seen, experts are talking about a scenario in which the disease could enter an “endemic phase” in India.

“We need to understand that the disease is nowhere to be eradicated. It is present and continues to expand. It is endemic only when it does not take on the proportions of a pandemic, ”says T Sundararaman, global coordinator of the People’s Health Movement and former executive director of the National Health System Resource Center.

For this to happen, Sundararaman explained that the R0 value of COVID-19 should be kept below 1. In epidemiology, R0 or R-naught is the average number at which a single infected person can transmit the disease. In short, it indicates how contagious an infectious disease is.

Recent research has shown that the Delta variant, the coronavirus responsible for the second wave in India, is between 5 and 8, meaning that it is as infectious as chickenpox.

“The level of transmission will be low and can last fairly indefinitely, just as we do with the flu or typhoid. In an endemism, there is no end point,” Sundararaman said, describing what an endemic COVID-19 scenario might look like.

In February of this year, a survey in the journal Nature found that an overwhelming majority of scientists – nearly 90 percent – “thought it was very or very likely that Sars-CoV-2 would become endemic.” A month later, Indian scientists predict at least the same thing.

“The magnitude of the second wave in the Himalayas reached what epidemiologists call the‘ herd immunity threshold ’, at which point the epidemic should reach an‘ endemic ’phase with low and stable numbers,” says renowned virologist and retired professor Dr. T John John. Al Jazeera said that India is the first country to reach the endemic phase.

While some are convinced of the endemism of COVID-19, others remain cautious.

“I am careful to say that India has become endemic because a bad variant that arises anywhere can change that balance,” Shahid Jameel, a renowned virologist and researcher at Green Templeton College, Oxford, told Al Jazeera.

Fear of emerging variants

Earlier this month, fears of another blockade spread as the southern state of Karnataka reported seven cases of the new. Delta Plus variant, subline of AY.4.2 Delta variant.

According to the news, about 40 cases of AY.4.2 were reported in at least six states.

Later, the SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium of India (INSACOG) said that the frequency of AY.4.2 is too low (less than 0.1 per cent of all variants of concern and interest) in India.

Delta tribes are said to be driving the third wave in the UK. The AY.4.2 sub-line, which is speculated to be 10-15 percent more transmissible than the Delta, is crossing Europe, causing reductions in case rates and an increase in hospital admissions.

The prevalence of the UK variant, according to the UK Health Safety Agency (UKHSA), has risen to almost 13 per cent of Delta cases. Delta Plus was first detected in July as a “variant under investigation” by the UKHSA last month.

“Clinical cases in Western countries are now among non-immune (mostly uninsulated). This means that the population’s immunity (or herd immunity) remains low as a result of past infections, as does their debt to the Delta variant, ”Jacob John said.

UKHSA data suggest that the steady rise is driven by unincorporated young groups. Jameel blamed “poor compliance” and “openness” for the country where children and teens who go to school are infected.

“But serious illnesses and mortality are very low (0.2% earlier compared to 2 percent). This is due to high vaccination rates in adults and mild natural infections in younger people,” Jameel said.

Vaccines for rescue

According to virologist John, Delta was relatively free in India. And as the two doses of vaccine are slowly rising, a very high immunity of the herd has been added as a result of the tremendous second wave.

Last month, Mumbai, one of India’s worst-hit cities, suffered no deaths for the first time since the pandemic began. New Delhi has already seen zero death days in recent months. The two cities most affected by the second wave found high seropositivity (an indicator of infection) in the population.

“We saw that 90 per cent of the people who were vaccinated had antibodies and among those who were not vaccinated, we found antibodies in 79 per cent of them,” said Dr Daksha Shah, deputy head of health at Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

According to a recent poll released by the BMC in September, Shah found that 86 percent of Mumbai residents had antibodies to coronavirus.

“The whole economy has opened up, trains, buses, halls have also opened up. Most of the restrictions have been alleviated. Even then the cases do not increase. And, of course, there is the impact of vaccines, ”Shah said.

New Delhi’s latest sero-survey – its sixth – reported more than 95 percent of seropositivity in samples from its districts due to vaccination or past infection. The national capital has reported a few cases and deaths continuously, despite removing all restrictions.

In eastern India, Kolkata erupted in daily cases after the Hindu festival of Durga Puja.

“Cases are dwindling, official data show that and in hospitals, we can see empty beds again. There was a surge in cases after Pujo, but it never turned into a raging wave like the second wave, ”Dr. Arjun Dasgupta, president of the West Bengal Medical Forum in Kolkata, told Al Jazeera.

“Immunity obtained in exchange for millions of deaths and the first doses of vaccines may have been done together.”

The government of India celebrated a remarkable milestone administering billions The dose of COVID-19 vaccine was recalled on October 21 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with an address addressed to the nation. This month, the government praised itself for vaccinating nearly 81% of the eligible adult population with the first dose.

Despite early celebrations, it is estimated that only about 40 percent of the population is vaccinated and millions of second doses are being skipped. Government data show that more than 120 million people did not receive a second dose.

India has reported a total of 34.5 million COVID-19 cases, second only to the United States. Deaths rose 236 in the last 24 hours to 466,147.

Meanwhile, India has been criticized for relying on digital solutions for its mega vaccination plan as an exclusionary and limiting approach.

On November 2, in an attempt to increase the number of vaccines and vaccinate them to receive a second dose, the Indian government launched a month-long door-to-door campaign, “Har Ghar Dastak” (Joka at Every Door).

“Doubts about vaccines are a serious problem. You can’t do this with OTP [one-time passwords] and applications. They [people] it needs to be traced, from house to house. We have an army of people who have done miracles. That’s how we got rid of smallpox and polio, ”Dasgupta said.