Vaccinate The Parents, Quickly

The third Covid wave will attack children. Here’s how we must prepare for it

- Devi Shetty

One of India’s best virologists, Dr Ravi from Nimhans Bengaluru, predicts that the third wave is likely to attack children predominantly. The Maharashtra government has created a task force to manage Covidinfected sick children during the third wave. I am not an epidemiologist, but common sense tells me they may be right.

The Covid virus mutates to attack as many new hosts as possible. During the first wave, Covid attacked mainly the elderly and spared youngsters. The second wave is attacking a large number of young breadwinners. The third wave is likely to attack children, since most adults are already infected or immunised.

Unfortunately, children under the age of 18 cannot be vaccinated. As a result, the only host left for the virus to attack will be children, and we have 165 million of them who are less than 12 years old. Even if we assume that just 20% of them get infected and 5% of the infected need critical care, we need 1.65 lakh paediatric ICU beds. Today we are struggling with about 90,000 ICU beds for adults and less than 2,000 beds for children.

I love children, and spent most of my professional life building one of the largest paediatric cardiac surgical ICUs in the world, during which I learnt many lessons.