In an interview where he talks about the current COVID-19 situation in both India and the United Kingdom, one of India’s top virologists, Shahid Jameel, has said “India seems to be going towards an endemic phase”.
He said “for the last 2-3 months cases have been steadily declining” but that “we haven’t reached endemicity as yet but are going towards it”. He added, “A bad variant is the fear”.
In a 22-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Shahid Jameel, who is at present a senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College at Oxford University, said that the situation in UK is cause for “concern though not panic” but, he added, the number of cases, which are growing between 40,000 and 45,000 each day, will rise further. “They are going to get worse but because the UK has done so well with vaccinations severe cases will be under control.”
Speaking about India, Jameel, who is also a professor at Ashoka University, said though it was not at the moment particularly worrying but the new Delta lineage must be monitored. At the moment, he added, it’s not a matter of serious concern.
Jameel said the cause of the surge in cases in the UK is much more likely to be a spread of the infection amongst teenagers and children. Nearly 50% of the new cases are from that age group.
Also read: ‘If Worrying Variants Don’t Emerge, India is Near Endemic Stage’
Elaborating, Jameel said the surge in UK cases is largely amongst children and teenagers, who have not been vaccinated or only in small percentages. However, he added, it’s very unlikely that they will fall seriously ill.
Speaking more about the UK, where he is at present, Jameel said that in the last week the seven-day average of daily cases has increased by 15% and the 7-day average of deaths has increased by 7%. However, he added: “While numbers are going up the number of people with severe disease is not going up.” Jameel pointed out that compared to January mortality today is down ten-fold.
Jameel said there is “no simple answer” why Britain has so many more cases than Germany, France and Spain. Not only does the UK have more daily cases than the other three countries together but the daily increase in UK is 4 times that of Germany, 6-7 times that of France and almost 18-19 times that of Spain.
The professor also said one concern facing the United Kingdom is that this year, unlike last year, any rise in COVID-19 cases will coincide with a large number of flu cases. He says that could be a worry because it’s “clinically hard to distinguish between them”. Also when both happen together more people will need to go to hospitals adding pressure on the healthcare system.
At the moment, however, pressure on the British healthcare system is easily manageable. Only 6% of NHS beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients compared to 30% in January.
However, Jameel pointed out that although serious illness and mortality are not a major concern of the present surge in the UK, something that could be a problem is the fact that a large number of cases provides an opportunity for the virus to mutate and we don’t know what sort of mutations we will end up with. A second concern is that people who get infected, but not seriously ill, could still end up with long COVID-19. That also can put pressure on the healthcare system.
Watch the full interview here.
