Covid-19 resurgence forces fresh restrictions in Maharashtra
ALARMED by signs that a second wave of the coronavirus epidemic is building, India’s richest state of Maharashtra ordered fresh restrictions on people’s movement and imposed night curfews in some cities, though not in the financial capital Mumbai.
Maharastra alone reported nearly 7,000 new cases on Sunday, a steep rise from just 2,000 cases earlier this month, with fears heightened by the appearance of new strains of the virus in parts of the country.
‘We just cannot afford to impose a second lockdown, people will have to follow the guidelines or else we could see a massive second wave,’ said SD Patil, a member of the Maharastra government team monitoring the spread of the disease in a state that accounts for nearly a fifth of India’s confirmed cases.
‘People will have to stop attending social events and non-essential travel at this juncture,’ he told on Monday.
In Mumbai, one of the worst-hit cities last year, masks and temperature checks were being made compulsory for tens of thousands of daily commuters using suburban trains that were reopened earlier this month. Police warned they would fine people without a mask.
In Pune, the state’s second largest city, an official said the percentage of people testing positive for the virus had doubled in a little over two weeks.
‘If we compare the positivity rate, fifteen days ago, it was 4.5 to five percent. But slowly it has been rising and reached 10 percent,’ said Saurabh Rao, the official in Pune.
Though national trends are worrying, new daily cases are still well below a mid-September peak of nearly 100,000. Testing numbers have also fallen to about 800,000 a day from more than one million.
India’s total tally of Covid-19 cases surpassed 11 million with 14,199 new infections being reported in a day, while active cases registered an increase for the fifth consecutive day, according to the Indian Health Ministry data updated on Monday.
The total coronavirus cases have increased to 1,10,05,850, while the death toll increased to 1,56,385 with 83 daily new fatalities, the data showed.
The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 1,06,99,410 which translates to a national Covid-19 recovery rate of 97.22 percent and the case fatality rate stands at 1.42 percent.
Active coronavirus infections in the country increased to 1,50,055 which comprises 1.36 percent of the total caseload, the data stated.
Herd immunity is very difficult to achieve and one should not think of it in practical terms in India, especially in the times of variant strains of Covid-19 and waning immunity, claimed AIIMS director Randeep Guleria on Sunday.
Guleria was speaking at the ongoing edition of Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in a session on his book Till We Win: India’s Fight
Against The Covid-19 Pandemic co-authored by public policy and health systems expert Chandrakant Lahariya and renowned vaccine researcher and virologist Gagandeep Kang.
‘Herd immunity is something that is going to be very, very difficult to achieve and it is something one should not really think of in practical terms... because the variant strains and varying immunity with times can lead to a chance where people may have reinfection or get infection again,’ the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) director said.
‘And one should also remember that large number of people have had mild infections and we do know that those with mild infection tend to have less antibodies production, their antibodies tend to wane over a period of time,’ he added.
Experts say herd immunity is said to have been developed in a population segment if at least 50-60 percent of those are found to have the presence of antibodies in a sero-prevalence survey.
Herd immunity implies that in any set of people in a community, after becoming affected by the virus, a lot many of them become immune to it, on account of antibodies developed in response to it. And, hence, such people become a protective layer between the infected person and unaffected people, thereby breaking the chain of viral transmission.
Guleria here also gave the example of Brazilian city Manaus which even after having achieved the herd immunity in October is now battling the second Covid-19 wave.
‘They (Brazil) had claimed that they got heard immunity with almost 70 per cent of the population being protected because of the past infection, and yet because of the Brazilian variant and waning immunity a large number of people got infected again. And now they are in a very bad situation because of resurgence of cases,’ he noted.
Meanwhile, country’s Health Ministry has written to all states and union territories (UTs) highlighting the need to significantly enhance the pace of Covid-19 vaccinations, noting that a large number of healthcare and frontline workers still remain to be covered.
In a letter addressed to chief secretaries of all states and UTs, country’s Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said the number of days of vaccination in a week should also be increased to a minimum of four days per week at the earliest to speed up the process of vaccination and gear up system to take up the vaccination of the 50+ population.
While some states are carrying out vaccination twice a week some others are carrying out four or more than four times a week.
Adequate provisions have been made in the Co-WIN software to support such expansion of services, he said.
The letter dated February 19 stated a large number of healthcare and frontline workers still remain to be covered and the progress is variable across several states and UTs.