One of India’s best virologists, Dr Ravi from Nimhans Bengaluru, predicts that the third wave is likely to attack children predominantly. The Maharashtra government has created a task force to manage Covid-infected sick children during the third wave.
The Covid virus mutates to attack as many new hosts as possible. During the first wave, Covid attacked mainly the elderly and spared youngsters. The second wave is attacking a large number of young breadwinners. The third wave is likely to attack children, since most adults are already infected or immunized.
Vaccination has started in the country but children under the age of 18 cannot be vaccinated. As a result, the only host left for the virus to attack will be children, and we have 165 million of them who are less than 12 years old. Even just 20% of them get infected and 5% of the infected need critical care,1.65 lakh pediatric ICU beds is needed.
Children are not miniature adults and unlike adults,two-month-old baby in the Covid ICU without one of the parents is impossible. Mothers need to breastfeed their babies, and someone should be there to ensure that the baby doesn’t throw the oxygen mask. In cardiac ICU, most kids are partially sedated, and when they are fully alert, and send them to the ward. That means we need to quickly vaccinate all the parents of young children with two doses. And this should happen now. We need to vaccinate at least 300 million young parents in the next few months.
Today, the market price for the first dose of vaccination is between Rs 800 to Rs 1,500. Rs 3,200-6,000 for two doses for both parents from working-class and low-income families is very expensive. For affordable vaccination, the government should negotiate with Indian and foreign vaccine manufacturers for 300 million vaccines and pay them in advance to deliver in record time.Once the parents are immunised, the chances of the children getting infected go down significantly.
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