by Peerzada Arshad Hamid
NEW DELHI, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- Even though India is easing its restrictions amid a sharp drop in new COVID-19 cases, the threat of a third wave looms large, as experts predict another wave might hit the country by the end of August but say it will be less brutal.
Daily new COVID-19 cases across the country dropped from a peak of more than 400,000 in May to over 25,000 at present.
The caseload will rise slowly instead of significantly, and the third wave will not be as chaotic as the second one, if the Delta variant remains dominant and no new variant has emerged, experts have said.
"I don't think that we will see a third wave which will be as bad as the second wave," said Randeep Guleria, director of India's premier health institute All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, adding that children would be "more susceptible" because they were not being vaccinated.
PREVENTIVE MEASURES URGED
With cities lifting restrictions and normal life resuming across the country, the best defense against the coronavirus is still the public's awareness of strictly following COVID-19 preventive measures.
India's health officials have urged people to wear face masks, wash hands and maintain social distancing, and people embarking on "revenge travel" have been strongly criticized.
Contrary to official reminders, many people are going to public places such as markets and tourist destinations totally unmasked, which in a way is good for businesses that have struggled to survive the pandemic but paves the way for a third wave of infections.
"We sometimes hear people saying that let us enjoy ourselves till the third wave -- have parties, attend functions. That approach is not correct. That is inviting new infections," Lav Agarwal, a senior health official said during a news conference. "We must remember that COVID-19 appropriate behaviour should be the new normal."
VACCINATION CAMPAIGN
With more than seven months into the vaccination drive, only about 9 percent of the country's adult population have been fully vaccinated, latest figures show.
So far, more than 554 million doses have been administered across the country, according to the health ministry.
More than 121 million people have been fully vaccinated, accounting for over 8.9 percent of India's population, and more than 422 million people, or over 30.9 percent of the population, have received a single dose, show data from scientific online publication Our World in Data.
The government aims to vaccinate the entire population above 18 years of age by the end of this year. Experts say India needs to administer 10 million doses a day to achieve the goal.
GOV'T PREPARATION
Last week, India's federal health ministry approved the allocation of over 971 million U.S. dollars -- 50 percent of the federal government's share in the emergency response package announced in July -- to states to prepare for the possible COVID-19 third wave.
The government said the funds will be used for boosting health care facilities to combat COVID-19 by building hospitals, oxygen plants and medication facilities across the country in both rural and urban areas.
The aim is to build a medical infrastructure, medical buffer stock and oxygen availability to prevent the possibility of shortages that were seen during the second wave, it said.
Officials said the government was preparing against the benchmark of the peak of COVID-19 caseloads reached in May and also taking into account the challenges that Delta and Delta plus variants may present.
READY FOR THIRD WAVE?
Mihir Sharma, an Indian economist-cum-columnist, said recently in an article that India is not as ready as it thinks for the upcoming third wave.
"Part of what is driving overconfidence is the particularly devastating nature of India's second wave. The broad spread of infection exposed a huge swath of Indians to the virus, who should thus now have some degree of immunity. Yet the simple fact is that we still don't know enough about the second wave to make easy predictions about the third," he said.
"What we do have is a series of surveys by the Indian Council of Medical Research sampling how many Indians have antibodies for COVID-19," said Sharma, adding results from the fourth survey, carried out in June and July, suggest that two-thirds of Indians have been exposed to COVID-19, up from roughly 24 percent in December and January.
"While that's a lot, it still leaves 400 million Indians without antibodies. A third or fourth wave might raise the overall death toll sharply. To make matters worse, we still don't have a good grasp of how many Indians have died thus far. The federal government claims a death toll under half a million. Some models suggest the real number could be 2 to 3 million. Other estimates are even higher," he said.
Sharma said the primary lesson from the second wave was that local healthcare systems need to be bolstered before cases spike, or they will be easily overwhelmed.
"The other crucial lesson of the second wave, when the world rallied to get oxygen and medicines to India, was that no country, even one as big as India, can deal with the pandemic alone," he said, adding, "India's establishment, which has turned inward on every front over the past few years, has chosen to forget that. India's slow vaccination effort, and a renewed vulnerability to COVID-19, is the price of this failure to learn." Enditem
