Early phase of variant always mild, understanding on Omicron possible by December-end, says top Indian scientist

Dismissing the conclusion that COVID’s Omicron strain only causes mild disease, a top scientist and official from the country’s apex genome sequencing institute told News18.com that the early phase of a variant is always mild and we may know the new version better by the end of December.

According to Dr Anurag Agrawal, director, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), it is good to hope that what has been true for South Africa should be true for India, but even mild viruses have the capability of bringing the entire healthcare system to its knees.

What’s prudent is that India should hope for the best but prepare for the worst, he said. “It is too early to conclude anything on Omicron at least before the end of December," he said.

IGIB, an institute under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has been sequencing the SARS-CoV-2 genes to detect Omicron and understand how it works.

Explaining further, Agrawal said, “We need to understand that the denominator is larger when it comes to India due to its size of population. Hence, the total number of severe cases will be large enough to break the entire healthcare system.”

The top scientist – who is also a pulmonologist and a medical researcher– explained why it’s too early to conclude anything on the new variant of the novel coronavirus.

“I would certainly want to wait for at least the end of December to conclude anything. Generally, the early part of the wave is mild and less severe. The reason is that young people get infected first because they are mobile. However, the wave intensifies as the infection reaches home and starts infecting elderly and vulnerable people,” he said.

‘People not realising the importance of masks’

WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Tuesday flagged that 77 countries have so far reported cases of Omicron. He said that Omicron is spreading at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant and expressed concern that people are dismissing the strain as mild. “Even if Omicron does cause less severe disease, the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems," the WHO chief.

“People are still not realising the emergence of Omicron. The public should immediately understand that only personal protection measures will help them in the long run. They must understand the importance of wearing masks and being compliant with COVID-appropriate behaviour,” he said.

The bigger problem with the “heavily mutated” variant is “we still don’t know which vaccine will work”.

“We know, so far, the one who has had natural Covid-19 infection plus he is vaccinated may not be at high risk but the one who has never been infected but vaccinated could be at some sort of risk,” Agrawal said.

‘Not much difference between South Africa and India’

Agrawal compared South Africa and India and concluded that it may not be correct to conclude that India is placed better.

“We, like South Africa, are not a high-income country but a low and medium-income country. While we have a high seropositivity rate, we might witness re-infection cases here,” he said.

We must consider that in South Africa the Covid-19 waves were caused by Beta and Delta strains, both, he added.

“Beta is likely to provide better protection and natural immunity against Omicron due to similar mutations whereas in India, infection was mostly caused by Delta,” Agrawal said. “We can only hope what is true for them is true for us, but we need to prepare for the worst.”

Commenting on the behaviour of Omicron in the United Kingdom, the scientist said, “What’s happening in the UK, Europe and South Africa shows us different pictures. The people in the UK and Europe have lower natural levels of immunity but their vaccination-induced immunity is high. On the other hand, in South Africa, the natural level of immunity is high but vaccine-induced immunity is low.”

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Himani Chandna