Race begins to prepare for possible next wave of virus
HOSPITALS STOCK UP SUPPLIES AS EXPERTS CALL TO SPEED UP VACCINATION
Two months ago, the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in India’s capital was a battlefield. Every one of its 1,500 beds for coronavirus patients was full. It came perilously close to running out of oxygen not once, but three times.
Now, the hospital has space for every patient who needs a bed and there is oxygen to spare. Ritu Saxena, the hospital’s deputy medical superintendent, no longer spends nights fielding calls from desperate relatives. Instead, she is focused on the future: helping prepare the hospital for more surges.
“The worst is definitely over,” a relieved Saxena said.
Gaining the upper hand
But now India faces the challenge of trying to gain the upper hand. A resurgence of the coronavirus is feared by many public health experts if nothing is done. Key to the scramble is a renewed vaccination push and efforts to boost India’s medical infrastructure to stockpile supplies, such as oxygen cylinders, and augment care networks from city slums to far-flung villages.
India’s vaccine makers, particularly the Serum Institute, are under pressure to enhance production to service the urgent domestic need even as the world waits for exports from the country to resume.
Failure could be brutal. India is reeling from a pandemic punch that brought staggering official daily death tolls of more than 4,500 at its peak in mid-May. At present, just 3.5 per cent of India’s more than 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated.
And the clock is ticking. The timing and intensity of another surge remain difficult to predict. K VijayRaghavan, a scientific adviser to the government, told reporters last month that a third wave was “inevitable” as the virus mutates. But, he said, the level of a coronavirus rebound could be reduced with strong measures.
“It depends much on how effectively the guidance is implemented,” he said referring to surveillance and containment measures.
India was caught off-guard by the ferocity of the coronavirus wave, driven largely by a highly infectious local variant. Hospitals ran full, medicines were in short supply and dead bodies were found floating in the Ganges river, a testament to the scale of the crisis.
“It’s not a question of whether but when,” said Giridhar Babu, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Foundation of India, referring to a possible new coronavirus wave. An “aggressive containment” strategy, he said, is essential.
“As soon as a cluster of cases is found, they should be sequenced for genomic markers to check if they are the same or new variants,” Babu said.
The other way to counter the inevitable was faster and wider vaccine coverage, he said
India’s vaccination drive that started in January with fanfare has hobbled in the past few months, at a time when it needed to have ramped up.
Doctors say the speed of vaccination is crucial for India. “The rapidity of vaccination plays an important role in the evolution of new variants,” said Lancelot Pinto, a pulmonologist at PD Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai. The virus, he said, will learn how to mutate and propagate among those not vaccinated.
“We don’t want to be in a situation where the pace [of vaccinations] is so slow that the virus outsmarts us,” Pinto said.
Babu said India’s goal should be to fully vaccinate all of its vulnerable population or those with comorbidities and administer one dose to all adults. For that, he said, India would need to administer 10 million doses a day, a challenging acceleration from its current 3 million doses daily.