New Delhi: World Health Organization Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said that India might be entering the endemic stage of Covid-19. As per the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the endemic stage is the ‘constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area’.
‘We may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low level transmission or moderate level transmission going on but we are not seeing the kinds of exponential growth and peaks that we saw a few months ago’, said Soumya Swaminathan in an interview given to The Wire.
‘As far as India is concerned that seems to be what is happening and because of the size of India and heterogeneity of population and immunity status in different parts of the country in different pockets, it is very feasible that the situation may continue like this with ups and downs in different parts of the country, particularly where there are more susceptible population. So those groups who were perhaps less affected by first and second waves or those areas with low levels of vaccine coverage we could see peaks and troughs for the next several months’, she said.
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‘We can take from the sero survey and what we learnt from other countries also that while it is possible that children could get infected and transmit. They could luckily have very mild illness most of the time and there is a small percentage that gets sick and get inflammatory complications and few will die but much much less than the adult population…But it is good to prepare… preparing hospitals for pediatric admissions, pediatric intensive care is going to serve our health system in many ways for other illnesses children have, but we should not panic about thousands of children crowding into ICUs’, she further added.
On clearance to Covaxin, she said she is fairly confident that the WHO’s technical group will be satisfied to give Covaxin clearance to be one of its authorised vaccines and that could happen by mid-September. ‘The Bharat Biotech submitted their data in the third week of July which was the first data set, then there was an updated data set that came in the middle of August. The committee has gone back to the company with some questions which they must be in process of answering now. I think the technical advisory group that ultimately approves will meet in the first 10 days of September and so we are hoping it happens soon after that’, said Soumya Swaminathan.
‘So, by the middle of September I am thinking, and the reason it took longer was because of back and forth and the need for more data requested from the company and this is the usual process. People think it is taking longer for Covaxin than for others but that is not the case… each company that applied for EUL (Emergency Use Listing) had taken this period of 4 to 6 to 8 weeks to get all the data needed’, she added.
Swaminathan said it was impossible to predict when the third wave of infections would hit India. ‘These are: your background level of population, immunity, natural infection and vaccination coverage, how are your personal and public health measures and variants etc. If any of this change or if all of them change in combination, which is what happened during the second wave, that’s what we need to be monitoring. It will be impossible to predict when, where the third wave will be upon us and if at all a third wave will come. However, you can make an educated guess on some of the variables that have an impact on transmission’, said the WHO Scientist.
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