Trust vaccines, booster to tame Omicron, beat Covid

The Omicron threat is in India just as it was bound to come considering how quickly the Covid-19 variant has been detected in 30 countries. How we deal with it in the light of the experience of having handled the predominant Alpha and Delta strains in successive waves in 2020 and 2021 will determine how Indians can preserve the gains already made in the economic sphere and in offering people a life close enough to pre-Covid normalcy. Science must lead the way but it needs time — at least two more weeks — to study the variant with multiple mutations. Until then, the time is not for panic but for measured responses that will best deal with an incipient crisis.

While tightening border controls with regard to testing international travellers is the best early protection, the means of doing so have been haphazard as evidenced in the virtual rip-offs that rapid RT-PCR testing has become at airports with private players chosen by the government under statutory emergency powers making unconscionable profits. Passengers being cooped up in terminals for hours make a fertile hunting ground for the Omicron, thought to be much more transmissible than the Delta strain. The methods may have to evolve into a more efficient test, trace, track and treat approach, beginning with greater number of testing centres at and around airports and the use of lateral flow tests to quicken the airport exit process.

All assumptions made so far might prove tragically misplaced if the new variant proves more deadly than initially thought. It would be the world’s great fortune if it proves to be the variant fitting into a historical pattern of virus evolution in which the less deadly strain becomes the dominant one. The risk of the variant is not so much related to how virulent it turns out to be but the landscape of immunity it encounters at the end of 2021. Making that environment better by inoculating the most vulnerable sections even as India moves past the halfway mark in double jabbing all its adult population should be the immediate tasks.

Nothing is ever certain with Covid and being prepared for the worst, like in ramping up the medial infrastructure, is the best indicated course. India has been on a path of learning to live with the virus long enough now to know that lockdowns are not the solution; nor does border vigilance do much except to put off the inevitable. Ramping up genome sequencing will help determine if Omicron will become the dominant strain as epidemiologists are hoping. It would be up to the people to comply with stricter Covid protocols like wearing a mask in all situations outside the home bubble.

The advent of Omicron might see some of the complacency that has set in disappear as the vaccine is still the best weapon because it helps avoid hospitalisation and death in the event of infection. Compulsory vaccination in a Covid passport system, as contemplated in a few EU nations, is a bridge too far in India, which has taken a pragmatic view of restrictions after an initial lockdown that was the world’s most severe. Trust the vaccines, including for children, and booster doses for the double-jabbed and hope the pandemic will peter out soon. This might be akin to gambling, but do we have a choice as the virus mutates as it evolves?

The advent of Omicron might see some of the complacency that has set in disappear as the vaccine is still the best weapon because it helps avoid hospitalisation and death in the event of infection