Covid-19 Crisis: Third wave of pandemic inevitable, warns government’s scientific advisor

As the country grapples with the second wave of coronavirus infections, a top scientific adviser of the government on Wednesday said that the third wave of the pandemic is ‘inevitable’ and the authorities must be prepared for it.

A phase three is inevitable, given the higher levels of circulating virus but it is not clear on what time scale this phase three will occur. We should prepare for new waves, K VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor said at a government briefing.

The government official warned that the Covid-19 vaccines will need to be “updated” to deal with the new strains that have sped up the contagion in the country, overwhelming hospitals and killing thousands of people.

“Variants are transmitted same as original strain. It doesn’t have properties of new kinds of transmission. It infects humans in a manner that makes it more transmissible as it gains entry, makes more copies and goes on, same as original,” Raghavan added.

India on Wednesday registered 3,82,315 new coronavirus cases, taking the tally in the country to 2,06,65,148 since the pandemic broke out in January 2020. The toll climbed by 3,780 to 2,26,188. The number of active cases in the country stood at 34,87,229. India has recorded more than 3 lakh cases a day for nearly 15 days in a row, since April 22.

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Few states including Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Rajasthan, and Bihar, are showing an increasing trend in daily Covid-19 cases, the government said today.

In a weekly report, the WHO said India accounted for 46 per cent of global cases and a quarter of global deaths reported in the past week.