Renowned vaccinologist Gagandeep Kang has said that, the current rise in coronavirus cases may go down by the middle to end of May. There could be one or two more peaks of the coronavirus cases but they may not be as bad as the current one, she said.
She further noted that, right now it’s doing a “world through” in areas it did not do last year, in the middle-class population, in the rural areas and there is going to be “very little fuel” for the virus to continue to go through.
Focusing on the fears about vaccines she mentioned that they are efficacious. She has emphasized on the need to increase the vaccination drive.
Showing concerns over the declining number of coronavirus tests, Kang said the proportion of cases is actually much more than the tests reveal but in absolute numbers in “what we track and count”
In response to a question in a webinar organised by the Indian Women Press Corps she said, “Best case estimates from a number of models are somewhere between the middle and the end of the month. Some models have it going into early June but based on what we are seeing, right now middle to end of May is a reasonable estimate.”
One can definitely use the characteristics of the strain, characteristics of a pandemic in a particular place to predict what is going to happen in that location if the data is available at that level for mathematical modelling, she explained on forecasting waves of the virus.
However, there are few infectious disease modellers in the country, she further noted.
“And all the ones that exist will tell you that their models are as good as the data they have and the models are accurate up to two weeks. You cannot expect a prediction for three months or six months or two years from now as yet. We don’t know enough about the virus. We don’t know enough about how it is going to,” she said.
On being questioned about the coronavirus prospects, she said this become like “a really bad flu virus”.
“This will become seasonal, like a really bad flu virus. It will be something like becoming more seasonal, that will settle down, that people will acquire a certain level of immunity because of repeated immunity and vaccinations,” she said.
“It may be imperfect in immunity, so we may need boosters if we keep having enough virus replications to have new mutants that have immune escape, but I am pretty sure that we are not going to have in this situation that we are in today too many more times. At least, not with this virus,” she said.
