After battling the ferocious second wave of coronavirus, India was in the grip of the third wave for quite some time this year. However, cases have dropped massively across the states and currently, the situation is under control. But, a report by the IIT experts last week, had warned that India is heading towards the fourth wave of COVID-19 which will possibly hit the country in mid-June. However, an eminent virologist has dismissed all the claims and said that there will be no 4th wave of COVID-19 in India. Noting that the third wave of COVID-19 has ended in India, virologist Dr T Jacob John said he is “fairly confident” that no fourth wave will occur in the country unless an unexpected variant that behaves differently comes up.
John, the former director of the Indian Council for Medical Research’s Centre of Advanced Research in Virology, said it can be confidently concluded that the third wave has ended and the country has entered an endemic phase once again. Speaking to the media, he said, “I say (entered endemic phase) since my own definition of an endemic state is ‘low and steady daily numbers, with only minor fluctuations, if any, for at least four weeks’. My personal expectation, hence my opinion, is that we will be in the endemic phase for more than four weeks. All states in India show the same trend, giving me this confidence.”
This comes days after an experts team from IIT Kanpur warned the Indian population about the fourth wave in mid-June. They also stated that the fourth wave of COVID-19 in India will only continue for about 4 months. “The data indicates that the fourth wave of Covid-19 in India will arrive after 936 days from the initial data availability date, which is January 30, 2020,” the authors of the study from IIT Kanpur said. “Therefore, the fourth wave starts from June 22, 2022, reaching its peak on August 23, 2022, and ends on October 24, 2022,” they wrote in the research paper. This is the same team of researchers who had earlier predicted about the third wave of COVID-19 in India (which actually happened at the time they had predicted).
However, addressing the media, the government of India had raised questions about the study results and urged experts to verify the details stated by the experts of the IIT Kanpur. In a press meet, NITI Aayog member, V.K.Paul said that more examinations are needed to understand whether the IIT study has scientific worth or not.
Current COVID-19 Picture In India
As the country witness a sharp fall in its daily active coronavirus cases, the latest report by the Union Health Ministry has stated that the country has logged 3,993 new coronavirus infections, the lowest in 662 days, on Tuesday. The third wave of COVID-19 had plateaued in India and the number of cases started declining after January 21 when 3,47,254 infections were reported. What is the endemic stage of a pandemic? According to the experts, the ‘endemic stage’ is when a population learns to live with a virus. It is different from the ‘epidemic stage’ when the virus overwhelms a population.
Talking about the various virologists and others predicting that there would be no COVID third wave, John explained the third wave was driven by Omicron and no one had predicted something like this to emerge, and that assumption that ‘no third wave would come’ was based on the variants present at that time. “Unless an unexpected variant that behaves differently from alpha, beta, gamma, or Omicron comes, there would be no fourth wave,” he said.
John underlined that there might not be a fourth wave of the pandemic now. “Taking all the available information in India — epidemiological and virus variants — and the global trend, we can be fairly confident that no fourth wave will occur, notwithstanding erudite mathematical model predictions. The model methodology is not valid in this situation,” he said.
Elaborating further, the virologist said all past pandemics of respiratory-transmitted diseases have been due to influenza and every influenza pandemic ended after two or three waves, and remained in an endemic phase, with minor fluctuations of seasonal upsurges, always settling back to low numbers. “Some years, the seasonal upsurges were by virus lineages that had undergone antigenic drift. SARS-CoV-2 will keep on developing mutations and it is possible that some mutations will cause some antigenic drift and such viruses may cause minor outbreaks — mostly few and far between. He further added, “So watchfulness, disease surveillance, and gene sequencing of a sample of viruses must continue so that we will not be taken by surprise by a mutant variant.”
(With inputs from Agencies)
