‘2ND wave likely to peak by May 7’
After the second wave of coronavirus infections, it is “inevitable” that India will also see a third wave, said Prof K Vijay Raghavan, the Principal scientific advisor to the central government.
Addressing a press briefing on India’s Covid-19 situation, Prof Raghavan said while the third Covid-19 wave is inevitable in India, the time when it will occur and its scale is not certain at present.
In the wake of the changing nature of variants, we must be ready for the third wave, he said. “We can’t predict the timing, but it seems inevitable. We must prepare ourselves and be ready for it.”
Prof Raghavan said while vaccines are effective against variants, but the scientific community needs to keep working on vaccines and make changes accordingly.
“Why should we care about SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing Covid-19) when we can potentially upgrade vaccines? It is only sometimes that variants can erode immunity so rapidly. We need to make a map of all possible changes that can happen in the virus Scientists are working to anticipate variants,” he said.
Speaking about the scale and ferocity of the second Covid-19 wave in India, Prof Raghavan said new emerging variants is one of the factors responsible for the spread of the infection.
“Immunity attained can fade away and someone who has been infected once can get re-infected. Decreased immunity and careless behaviour had driven the second wave,” he said.
2ND Wave Likely To Peak By May 7
On Tuesday, in an interview to a news channel, Prof M Vidyasagar, the government’s mathematical modeling expert on Covid-19 case predictions, said by May 7, India could see the peak of the second wave of coronavirus cases.
“If you take the nation as a whole, our prediction is that we may see a decline coming by the end of this week, which is by about May 7. Cases should start declining, but different states will peak at different times. The nationwide and cumulative total is at the peak now or is very, very close to it,” he said.
If the predictions hold true, it would be a huge relief for the country to cross the national peak of the second wave by this weekend.
“We take the seven-day rolling average because the daily numbers keep fluctuating. As a result, we should not just look at the raw numbers but also at a daily moving average. That number will begin to decline by the end of the present week,” Prof Vidyasagar said. Courtesy: India Today.
