India needs its own data to decide on vaccinating children, said virologist Dr Gagandeep Kang in an interview with CNBC-TV18 on Monday. Kang said that there have been very few studies that have looked at how many children got infected and how many of those infections resulted in severe disease and mortality.
On the impending third wave of coronavirus, she said that if there are no new variants, the chances of a third wave as strong as the second is extremely unlikely. She attributed this to the bulk of the population either being infected or vaccinated.
“Our vaccination numbers are climbing every day and that is something that he needs to continue to focus on to make sure that we are protecting people as much as possible. The models are conjectures and quite frankly, for many of the conjectures that are predicting a third wave, I really don’t know where they are getting their input data from,” she said.
While countries such as the United States, Isreal, and some in Europe have started vaccinating children older than 12 years, the advisory panel of the United Kingdom has refrained from recommending jabs to kids aged between 12 and 15.
For India, she said that before making any decisions it would be great to see that data on how the pandemic has played out.
“We know that severe disease and mortality numbers are not zero but we don’t know what the denominator is, we don’t know what that is as a fraction of all the children who were potentially infected. For making decisions that are appropriate for our children, we need our data,” said Kang.
About strategy for the Ganesh Chathurthi festival, which the Maharashtra government has warned about, Kang said that infected people who are identified must be encouraged to be quarantined or isolated depending on the facilities they have at home.
“We definitely do not want this disease to be continuing to spread because there are still vulnerable people who either have not been vaccinated or infected or for some reason are unable to mount a protective immune response. So when a case is detected, absolutely, quarantine and isolation is the way to go. Make sure that their contacts are traced, tested and isolated is found to be positive,” she said
Kang cautioned that vaccination or prior infection does not protect a person from subsequent infections. She advised that public health precautions such as testing, masking be strictly followed.
She added that Covid-19 could stay with us for a while. “Most of the infectious diseases that we have our endemic tuberculosis is endemic, cholera in India even though it causes outbreaks is an endemic disease. Rotavirus is endemic, influenza causes, again, a pattern of disease but is actually an endemic infection. Most infections that are in populations over long periods of time are called endemic.”
As a few countries are mulling over booster doses, Kang said that India is in a fortunate position because of the intensity of the second wave. “I think we should wait and watch. We are actually in a very fortunate position because of the difficult time we went through with the second wave. Having a sero prevalence of about two-thirds even before vaccine coverage became really high gives us a distinct advantage that other parts of the world have not had,” she said.
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