Both Omicron, Delta will co-circulate, Coronavirus is here to stay in future, opine experts

Even as we are at a long distance from the end of the Covid-19 third wave, health experts have opined that the disease is going to stay with us for a long time in future. The health experts have said that both the variants Omicron and Delta will co-circulate in the near future. Dr T Jacob John, former director of ICMR’s Centre of Advanced Research in Virology said that both the variants of Omicron and Delta will co-circulate in the time to come, the Indian Express reported.

More importantly, Dr John emphasised on vaccinating children quickly to minimise the spread of the virus. He said that he is an advocate of child vaccinations which are safe and effective. He warned that if children are left unvaccinated for long, their community will act as virus reservoirs and there are results for all to see as the Omicron variant is affecting children readily.

In addition to Dr John, there were other health experts who were speaking at an online discussion on ‘Variants, Vaccines and Us’ on Thursday. All health experts who participated in the online event emphasised on the significance of vaccinations for children, booster dose and increased frequency of RT-PCR tests. The experts were unanimous in their opinion to say that it is unlikely that the world will enter back in the pre-Covid era anytime soon.

Dr V Ramasubramanian, who is a consultant for infectious diseases and tropical medicine at Apollo hospitals that since Omiron largely has mild symptoms like cold, cough and fever, it is to some extent manageable but if some other variant with the severity of delta spreads at the speed of Omicron in future, it will be very bad news. Dr V Ravi, who is the nodal officer for genomic confirmation of SARS-CoV-2, in the government of Karnataka said that the best bet to minimise the severity of our disease.

India in the last 24 hours has reported the addition of 2.64 lakh new Coronavirus cases in the country taking the tally of active cases to 12.7 lakh. The national daily positivity rate was reported at 14 percent which is extremely high and suggests that the spread of the disease is extremely fast in the larger population.