Your Lungs And You – 6
By Dr Arvind Kumar*
More than two and half years since the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China, COVID-19 remains a global emergency and news mutants continue to raise immense concerns. The World Health Organization (WHO) says new waves of the mutants demonstrate again that COVID-19 is nowhere near over. As of July 10, 2022, just under 553 million confirmed cases and over 6.3 million deaths have been reported globally.
Even India reported 120 222 new cases (8.7 new cases per 100 000; +7%), and 229 new deaths (<1 new death per 100 000; +15%), during the week of July 4 to 10, 2022.
Globally, the Omicron lineages BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 show declining trends, while BA.4 and BA.5 show increasing trends. Sub-variants of Omicron, like BA.4 and BA.5, continue to drive waves of cases, hospitalisation and death around the world.
In countries like India, a new sub-lineage of BA.2.75 has also been detected, which may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection. As BA.2.75 gains ground in India and beyond, it’s quite natural that the worry signs are back at a time when the public has largely been feeling that the worst may be over as far as the pandemic is concerned. Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has said that it’s yet to be determined whether BA.2.75 would outcompete the BA.5 variant.
The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi acknowledges that the latest mutant has been spotted in several distant states in India, and appears to be spreading faster than other variants there”.
There are plenty of ifs and buts as yet and scientists are yet to figure out if BA.2.75 is going to turn out to be more deadly than the other Omicron variants, including the BA.5. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on July 6, 2022, that WHO was ‘following’ the new sub-lineage of BA.2.75.
As much as we would like to nurture the wish that the pandemic becomes endemic, the facts on the ground dictate otherwise. The expectation that COVID-19 will become endemic essentially means that the pandemic will not end with the virus disappearing; instead, enough people will gain immune protection from vaccination and from natural infection such that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate.
The new coronavirus mutants have raised immense concerns. While vaccines and boosters are still the best defence against severe COVID-19, and updated formulations of the COVID-19 vaccine are likely to get the nod soon to target the more recent Omicron strains that have been causing a lot of concern across the globe including in India, the growing concern over the mutants underlines the need for more sustained efforts to track and trace viruses that combine genetic efforts with real-world information about who is getting sick and how badly.
At the twelfth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) Emergency Committee regarding the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, held on Friday, July 8, 2022, the Committee among other things, recommended that States Parties should integrate respiratory disease surveillance, for instance by leveraging and enhancing the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS). “States Parties should be encouraged to 1) maintain representative testing strategies; 2) focus on early warning and trend monitoring, including through the progressive development and introduction of environmental surveillance schemes (e.g., wastewater surveillance); 3) monitor severity in vulnerable groups; and 4) enhance laboratory surveillance to detect, track and characterize potential new variants and monitor the evolution of SARS-COV-2,” it recommended.
As we live with a higher level of risk than we used to in the pre-pandemic world, besides being careful, there’s indeed the need to guard ourselves against air pollution. In this connection, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests using an advanced HEPA air purification system, together with other effective safety measures at home and work-places and educational institutions to ward off the twin threats of pollution and Coronavirus.
Even surveillance mustn’t be a start-stop strategy either.
*MD (Medicine)
(Your Lungs And You series is an awareness campaign run by an NGO, The Eminent, in collaboration with PetriMed CA, an air purification system with 99.999% filtration and coupled with UV-C disinfectation and air ioniser, using 8 – stage filtration technology).
