In an interview to assess the present Omicron situation in the country, Professor Gautam Menon of Ashoka University, who has worked on tracking the trajectory of coronavirus waves in India, says the sharp decline in daily cases and the positivity rate shows that the Omicron wave is subsiding and retreating. “We’re on the downswing of the slope” he said.
Speaking in the joint discussion, Professor Gagandeep Kang of Christian Medical College in Vellore, who is a member of the government’s Covid Working Group which advises on vaccination, said as far as the general population is concerned she’s “not sure boosters are needed for dealing with Omicron”.
Speaking in a joint 30-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Menon, who is Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University in Sonipat, said models have suggested the Omicron wave in India would peak in different places between January 20 and February 10 and this is precisely what is now happening. It’s already peaked and started to recede in big cities and that will now also happen in the rest of the country. Menon said the R number has fallen below 1. The R number determines how many more people an infected person in turn infects. An R number below 1 means the virus is running out of people to infect.
Asked about reports that the government is considering not giving boosters to people beyond those sections of the population already entitled to receive them, Kang said she is “not sure boosters are needed for dealing with Omicron”. She also added: “Will this be required in future for another variant is a different question.”
Explaining her position, Kang said: “At the moment, given the lack of widespread effectiveness data after two doses, I don’t know what we would base our decision to give three doses on.” Speaking specifically about people who are not at present entitled to a third shot: “We need to understand whether the rest of the population’s protection from two doses has waned or not…since we don’t have effectiveness data it’s hard to tell whether effectiveness has waned over time or with Omicron.”
Kang said her belief is given the high level of infection and the high level of vaccination in India, she’s “not sure boosters are needed for dealing with Omicron”.
Asked by The Wire why boosters can’t be given to the rest of the population on the basis of data gathered from abroad – the UK, The European Union, Israel and the US – because, surely, India is not unique, Kang replied by saying India is unique.
She then gave three reasons why foreign data cannot apply to India. First, the age distribution of the population is very different. Second, the exposure to Delta is very different. Third, the age distribution of people who received AstraZeneca/Covishield is very different in India compared to UK and Europe. In India, it was given to everyone over 18. In the UK and Europe it was largely limited to older age individuals. Therefore, Kang concluded: “I don’t think we are in a situation where we can just take data from the rest of the world and apply it to ourselves”.
Finally, Kang said with Omicron dominant it is time to change the public health strategy for tackling coronavirus and reduce the emphasis on test, track and isolation. As she put it: “Test, track and isolate makes sense in the early stages of a new variant (but) after that in the situation we are in today you possibly need some level of sentinel surveillance but you don’t need the amount of resources we are investing in testing … time for doing this sort of surveillance (i.e. mass testing) for SARS CoV-2 is coming to a close”.
Kang agreed that the emphasis newspapers and television channels put on reporting daily cases and daily positivity is unnecessary and could be misleading. When asked this question her reply was: “absolutely”. She suggested that instead we need weekly or monthly figures rather than daily.
Kang added what we need is “much much more environmental surveillance i.e. sewage sampling”.
Watch the full interview here.