Upgrading for the challenge

Even as hospitals in India battle Omicron and a surge in Covid-19 cases, they are building a health care system that will make them pandemic-proof

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

Look who walked into the new year with us—the virus, albeit in a new avatar. While a third wave was inevitable, as predicted by experts like K. VijayRaghavan, India’s principal scientific adviser, last October, the sudden surge in cases now “may be because the virus was waiting for the dawn of a new year to bite,” says Professor Gobardhan Das, head of department, molecular medicine, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

In India, in the first week alone, it infected an average of 1.12 lakh people daily—a 500 per cent jump from the daily cases reported the week preceding it. Ever since the third wave began on December 21, 2021, nearly 4,500 cases of the Omicron variant, the now dominant circulating strain that affects the upper respiratory tract as against the Delta variant that affected the lungs, have been detected across India (till January 11).

The last time India witnessed an exponential rise in cases was during the second wave—May 6, 2021, saw 4.14 lakh cases and there was an average of nearly four lakh daily infections for seven days. “I won’t be surprised to see India easily crossing that figure in the next week or so, given that the Omicron is at least 10 times faster than Delta that rocked us last year,” says Das. Globally, more than 25 lakh Covid cases were recorded on January 4, the highest ever since the pandemic began two years ago.

As of January 9, the reproduction number of Covid-19 for India stood at 4.03, much higher than the 1.69 recorded during the peak of the second wave. This means that a single infected person can now be expected to transmit the disease to at least four people.