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Updated September 21st, 2021 at 06:39 IST

COVID: India heading towards 'endemicity'; third wave likely, warns top Vaccinologist

Top vaccinologist stressed India may be entering some kind of stage of ‘endemicity’, and warned for a possible third wave of the COVID pandemic.

Reported by: Ajeet Kumar
COVID
Image: PTI | Image:self
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A month after the Chief Scientist of the World Health Organisation warned COVID-19 in India may be entering some kind of stage of ‘endemicity’, on Monday, India's top vaccinologist Dr Gangandeep Kang reiterated the same and warned of a possible third wave of the COVID pandemic. The Vaccinologist noted the local flare-ups that will be smaller and spread wider across the country may add up to form a third wave of the pandemic. However, she asserted that the scale would not be the same as the first and second waves of the pandemic. It is worth noting that the endemic is a stage when a population learns to live with a virus. According to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, it is very different from the epidemic and can be predictable.

In an interview with PTI, Kang, who is a professor in the Christian Medical College, Vellore, said after the second wave, a quarter of the country's population may continue to be susceptible to the virus. "So will we be able to achieve within that quarter the same numbers and the same patterns that we saw in the second wave? That I think is unlikely. What we will see are local flare-ups that will be smaller and spread wider across the country. Now if that will collect to form the third wave, that may happen if we have a lot of behaviour change around festivals, but the scale is not going to be anything like what we saw before," she said.

"India has had a lot of endemic diseases like influenza before COVID-19"

When asked if the coronavirus may be heading towards an endemic stage in India, the professor replied, "Yes." "When you have something that is not going to go away in the near future, it is heading towards endemicity. Right now, we are not looking at eradicating or eliminating SARS-CoV2, which means it has to become endemic," added Kang. "We have a lot of endemic diseases like influenza, but you can have a pandemic layered on top of an endemic disease. So for example, if you get a new variant that completely escapes the immune response, you could have a pandemic again but that would not mean that SARS-CoV2 is only a pandemic and has stopped being endemic.

"There is both because one set of the variant will be doing something while another would be doing something else," she explained. Further, the professor stressed that the country needs to develop a better vaccine that could deal with the newer variants of the deadly virus. On September 20, the country recorded 30,256 new cases in the last 24 hours. As many as 43,938 patients have recovered in the last 24 hours, taking the tally to 3,27,15,105. For the last 87 days, the weekly positivity rate (2.07%) is less than 3 per cent, while the daily positivity rate is less than 3 per cent for the past 21 days.

(With inputs from PTI)

(Image: PTI)

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Published September 21st, 2021 at 06:39 IST

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