COVID-19 pandemic to end soon?
"This pandemic is nowhere near over," the World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters from the WHO's headquarters in Geneva this week around the same time when the United Kingdom (UK) decided to lift curbs like use of face masks and COVID passports. Meanwhile, at home, restrictions will continue at many places, including weekend curfew in Delhi, except in few places like Mumbai where the state government has decided to reopen schools.
Is it too early to accept that COVID is on its way to exit?
"It's a reminder of what this country can accomplish when we all work together," Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom said at the Downing Street press conference on the government's move to drop work from home, wearing of masks in schools and communal areas and its intention to end the legal requirement for people who test positive for Covid to self-isolate.
As per BBC, UK daily infections remain high but are falling; on Wednesday, the UK recorded 108,069 new cases.
Meanwhile, India on Wednesday reported 3.47 lakh new Covid-19 cases and 703 deaths. The country's Omicron tally stands at 9,692.
Whether it's a smart move to lift the curbs or not is difficult to tell. Restrictions- whether imposition or removal- are mostly decided based on facts and data on the number of cases, infection risk of variants and vaccination in the entire population.
A study published in the Lancet on January 19, says that on around January 17, 2022 there were 125 million Omicron infections a day in the world, which is more than ten times the peak of the delta wave in April, 2021. However, the study says, the proportion of cases that are asymptomatic or mild, which is around 80-90% for Omicron variant, has increased compared with previous variants, which is why the global infection-detection rate has declined globally from 20% to 5%.
On the case rate, Dr Susan Hopkins, the UK Health Security Agency's chief medical adviser told BBC that the case rates would largely decline but may plateau at some point". Vaccine uptake and mask wearing around strangers would determine how quickly that happens, she added.
Can we say that the Delta variant will be the severest among all?
This seems so till now.
While few researchers thank the vaccination for counteracting the Omicron variant, many others say the characteristics of this variant is super spreading in nature while it shows mild symptoms during infection.
"The omicron wave is inexorably reaching every continent with only a few countries in eastern Europe, North Africa, southeast Asia, and Oceania yet to start their wave of this SARS-CoV-2 variant. The unprecedented level of infection suggests that more than 50% of the world will have been infected with omicron between the end of November, 2021 and the end of March, 2022," the Lancet study says.
Seeing the virus spreading at a faster pace Along with narratives on how mild it is, the WHO says, "Omicron may be less severe, on average, but the narrative that it is a mild disease is misleading."
"An exponential rise in cases, regardless of the severity of the individual variants, leads to inevitable increase in hospitalisations and deaths," WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told Tuesday's press conference.
Some 45,000 deaths from the disease were still being registered worldwide every week, the WHO says.
"With the incredible growth of Omicron globally, new variants are likely to emerge," WHO Chief has cautioned people.
A pan-COVID vaccine is the solution?
The vaccines that are being used recently against COVID are less effective in protecting the human body against the Omicron variant, WHO says. They are, however, effective in preventing serious disease and death, it says.
There seems to be an inevitable demand for variant specific vaccines. However, says WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan, "the danger is that you will be always trying to play catch-up with the next variant." A better approach, she suggests, is multivalent vaccines or a pan-coronavirus vaccine. Developing variant specific vaccines against a mutating virus calls for intensive research and studies.
Meanwhile, the existing vaccines and boosters or precautionary doses will give immunity against the virus, studies have found.
"With continued increases in COVID-19 vaccination, the use in many countries of a third vaccine dose, and high levels of infection-acquired immunity, for some time global levels of SARS-CoV-2 immunity should be at an all time high. For some weeks or months, the world should expect low levels of virus transmission," the Lancet study says.
"This should not be seen as the "finish line" because the virus and future variants cannot be eradicated - instead "we must learn to live with Covid in the same way we live with flu," said the UK Health Secretary, pressing needs for vaccination and following COVID safety rules. The UK government mulls to set out long-term strategy for living with coronavirus.