Is Omicron saving India or is it just an impression? Wsj report
The devastating wave of infections that swept India last year could now cause less damage despite Omicron, but not all experts are of the same opinion. Here's what the Wall Street Journal writes
Cases of Covid-19 in New Delhi and Mumbai have dropped sharply in recent days, as a peak of the Omicron variant reaches some of India's largest cities, raising hopes that previous infections will offset a relatively low vaccination rate and help to prevent a repeat of last year's catastrophic wave.
India is still weeks away from a national peak as the virus continues to spread to rural areas and smaller cities, according to doctors and public health experts, who also warn that day-to-day hospitalizations and deaths are likely to continue. go up even if infections slow down.
Even so, they say early signs point to a less severe wave than last year, when Indian hospitals ran out of beds, oxygen and medical supplies, leaving many people to die at home and forcing crematoria to work. hours a day.
In New Delhi – India's second largest city – new cases dropped for five days straight after reaching a high of 28,867 on Thursday. In Mumbai, the financial capital and most populous city, 6,149 new infections were reported daily on Tuesday, following a peak of 20,971 cases on Jan.7. Officials from both cities say about 80 percent of hospital beds are empty – writes the WSJ .
A rapid decline in cases following a huge surge is a pattern seen with the Omicron variant in other countries such as South Africa, epidemiologists say. But they are watching India particularly closely due to its large population, its relatively low vaccination rate and the severity of last year's wave – factors that led public health experts to warn that the country's hospitals could be overwhelmed by Omicron.
"The virus is encountering an entire population of people who are already previously infected and immune or vaccinated and immune," said T. Jacob John, a retired professor of virology at Christian Medical College in the southern Indian city of Vellore. "This adds to the mildness of the disease."
Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University, said his model shows that all parts of India will peak by February 10. Given the low test rate, the model hypothesized that actual infections are 15 times higher than the official count – though it's possible the true count could be 20 to 25 times, he said.
"Overall, Omicron's impact on India has been milder" than last year, he said. "This is really something to celebrate."
Delhi and Mumbai were devastated by the wave last April and May. Now, about 97% of Delhi residents and 87% of Mumbai residents have antibodies to Covid-19, which could be the result of previous infections or vaccinations, according to the government's serological surveys. Both cities have a higher portion of their fully vaccinated population than the national rate of 47.7%.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare did not respond to a request for comment.
Doctors in India have reported that recent Covid-19 patients are generally less severely ill than during last year's surge – in line with some initial studies indicating Omicron cases tend to be milder than the Delta variant.
Public health experts warn that it is too early to say that India has overcome the worst of Omicron, noting that hundreds of millions of children are not eligible for vaccination and that the elderly and the immunocompromised remain vulnerable. Even if a fraction of India's nearly 1.4 billion people become seriously ill, its hospitals could still be overwhelmed, they say.
They also point out that daily hospitalizations and deaths are better indicators of the severity of the variant. On Wednesday, India reported 441 deaths from Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, an increase from the past few days but down from 534 on January 5. This is still far below the second wave, when the official tally recorded nearly 4,500 deaths per day in May. Hospitalizations are also about 75 percent lower than last year, said Lalit Kant, former head of the Division of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases at the Indian Medical Research Council.
"The wave comes first and retreats earlier in the metropolises," said K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. "A peak in Delhi and Mumbai does not mean the end of the third wave in India".
RK Mani, director of clinical services at Yashoda Super Specialty Hospital in a suburb of Delhi, said the hospital is now admitting about 10 patients a day, up from two daily two weeks ago. "We can't jump to the conclusion that everything is benign," he said.
But the Covid-19 patients who died in the past few weeks all had underlying health conditions like cancer, and most of the others had relatively mild symptoms like stuffy noses, sore throats, and low-grade fever, he said. Many can be discharged after five days, compared to 10 days last year.
Other important indicators in determining the peak are the positivity rate – the percentage of Covid-19 tests that are positive – and the virus reproduction rate, which is the number of people a single contagious person can infect.
The reproduction rate nearly halved to 2.2 in the week ended January 13 compared to the first week of 2022, according to a study by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
The national positivity rate also dropped slightly to 15.13% on Wednesday, after reaching nearly 20% on Monday. Both Delhi and Mumbai have reported declining positivity rates in the past few days.
But pinpointing the timing of the peak is tricky: "The peak timing will be difficult to determine as we are not testing, tracking and tracking enough," said Arun K. Sharma, director of the National Institute for Noncommunicable Diseases Implementation Research in the western India city of Jodhpur. "If the decline continues for a week, then we can say that we are close to the peak."
(Extract from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/omicron-sta-risparmiando-india-o-e-solo-unimpressione/ on Sat, 22 Jan 2022 06:32:37 +0000.