Amid fear of a possible third wave sweeping India, leading Covid-19 experts now believe that another resurgence of the virus is unlikely due to a high seroprevalence rate, brisk vaccination and dominance of the Delta variant which devastated the country during the second wave.
“From the data we’ve seen so far, Delta has taken over from other variants. Because it has a transmissibility factor between 5 and 6, it pretty much drives out everything else that has a lower reproductive ratio,” said Dr Gautam Menon, Professor of Biology and Physics at Ashoka University in Sonipat, Haryana.
One of the casualties of a rampant Delta in India has been the Beta variant (B.1.315), which had more immune escape possibilities than others but found itself drowned out by the former.
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As per official data sources, only eight sequences of Beta have been found in Karnataka so far, out of over 2,900 sequences processed, while country-wide only some 190 Beta sequences have been found.
Although Delta has now become an unwitting ally, it is just one equation among others negating the emergence of a third wave, said public health expert and epidemiologist Dr Chandrakant Lahariya. The threat of a new variant of concern emerging remains, he added.
“Based on the findings of the nationwide and state-specific serosurveys, it was found that 67.6% of the population had antibodies (as of May), the majority of them due to natural infection,” said Dr Lahariya.
“The second set of information we have is the vaccination rate: around 70% of the adult Indian population has received at least one shot. If we put all of this together, epidemiological principles tell us that it is very unlikely that a country like India is going to have a fresh national wave.”
This is just as well, he added, because the government’s health system is not any better prepared than it was prepared in March 2021. “Hardly anything has changed except for the focus intervention for testing services,” he pointed out.
At the same time, experts cautioned about local outbreaks specific to certain states and districts, although these will likely not be as serious as the second wave.
The key takeaway, Dr Menon pointed out, is that there is no way for anyone to avoid getting infected if the virus becomes endemic.
“It is very likely that like other coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the novel coronavirus will also become endemic,” he said, adding that it might take “maybe 6 to 8 months for us to determine if it has become endemic in India”.
The wildcard, however, is reinfection, said Sundararaman T, former Executive Director, National Health Systems Resource Centre.
“Some studies say the Delta variant re-infects people who had contracted an earlier variant of the novel coronavirus, but others have actually said that reinfection is a result of immune escape — different from breakthrough infections — and that makes it an entirely different ball game. If a variant emerges with immune escape capabilities, we will again be in a deep problem all over again,” he said.
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