NEW DELHI, Dec 28: In yet another prediction about a possible third wave in India driven by Omicron variant, a researcher in the University of Cambridge who is regularly tracking Covid development in India, believes that the country with 1.4 billion population may see an immediate huge spurt in the infection but it would be very short-lived.
“India may see a spurt in the Covid-19 growth rate within days and head into an intense but short-lived virus wave as the highly-infectious omicron variant moves through the crowded nation,” the researcher Paul Kattuman predicted.
“It is likely that India will see a period of explosive growth in daily cases and that the intense growth phase will be relatively short. New infections will begin to rise in a few days, possibly within this week,” he said, adding that it was hard to predict how high the daily cases could go.
Kattuman and his team of researchers, developers of the India Covid tracker, are seeing a sharp rise in infection rates across India. The tracker spotlighted six states as a “significant concern” in a Dec. 24 note, with adjusted growth rate of new cases exceeding 5%. This had expanded to 11 Indian states by Dec. 26, according to the tracker, which corrects for “day of the week effects” and other variations.
India, which has confirmed 34.8 million infections and 480,290 deaths so far, is already gearing up to deal with another massive outbreak even though only 653 cases of the highly-mutated omicron have been identified so far. Delhi closed cinemas, schools and gyms and introduced restrictions on public gathering on Tuesday — a day after it reported the most new cases in more than four months. Night curfew kicks in from 10 p.m to 5 a.m. and bars, restaurants as well as offices will have 50% occupancy. Night curfews have also returned to many other major centres in various states in the country.
These policy decisions underscore hard lessons India learned after a deadly delta-led virus wave in April and May that pushed infections to a record-beating 400,000-plus each day overwhelming the country’s hospitals and crematoriums.
For records, the Cambridge India tracker had correctly called the peak of this devastating second wave in May and also forecast in August that India would see a slow burn in its Covid infections curve until the vaccination coverage was sufficiently high. India crossed 1 billion administered vaccine doses in October and new cases plunged in tandem with that milestone.
(Manas Dasgupta)