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Covid outbreak will ’end’ in February, says expert panel

Covid outbreak will ’end’ in February, says expert panel


Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, Oct 19, 2020:    India’s Covid-19 epidemic will potentially “end” in late February, after a total of 106 lakh symptomatic cases have occurred, a committee of eminent scientists assigned to map the outbreak said on Sunday.

 

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This is based on the scale of antibody development within the population, Professor M Vidyasagar of IIT Hyderabad, who is the chairman of the Covid-19 Supermodel Committee, said during a web conference. The committee was constituted on June 1 by the Department of Science and Technology.

According to the committee’s mathematical projection, 30% of the population currently have antibodies, up from 14% in mid-August. But the scientists were quick to warn that the projected end of the outbreak would only happen if sufficient protective measures continue. “Already, there is concern that the virus may rebound in the coming winter as there is evidence that it is more active in cooler climates,” they said.

On top of this, the holiday season is expected to add numbers. Vidyasagar pointed to Kerala’s Onam festival, which, he said, triggered the state’s sharp rise in numbers, bolstered by a 32% increase in infection probability.

But how certain can we be that the outbreak will end In February? “It is not really meaningful to put ‘error bars’ unless one is doing statistical estimation, which we are not,” Vidyasagar told DH. “Our projection is that by February 2021, the number of cases will be so negligible that one can say the pandemic has run its course. This does not mean that the number of cases will be zero, just very small.”

Reinfection risk


Although there has been concern about reinfections prolonging the epidemic, Lt-General Madhuri Kanitkar, another committee member and Deputy Chief of the Integrated Defence Staff (Medical), described these as “outliers” and not a regular phenomenon.

“In India, there have been only three cases of reinfection as proved by genomic testing,” she said.

Vidyasagar added: “In some cases, these infections could be because people are discharged prematurely from hospitals, meaning that they were never free of the virus to begin with.”

Surprisingly, the committee declared that migrants returning to their home states had not spread the disease further, saying “there was no bump” to the infection numbers. However, they conceded that they did not know “whether this was due to quarantining or some other facets, we did not honestly examine because those policies vary from one state to another.”

The committee, which also has a mandate to quantify the effects of the lockdown, said that if there had been no restrictions, the country would have peaked in June, but would have reached 140 lakh cases. This would have also come with a death toll of 25 lakh by August.

“Given our lack of preparedness back then, the healthcare system would have been overwhelmed,” Vidyasagar said.


Courtesy: Deccan Herald


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