With the Omicron variant of Covid-19 circulating in the community, Dr Faheem Younus, Infectious Diseases Chief at the Maryland University, has urged people to get their booster doses.
“Look. Then go get your booster,” wrote the top US expert on Twitter while sharing a post that said, “Switzerland has begun reporting Covid deaths among three different groups of people: unvaccinated; vaccinated but not boosted; and boosted. “
Meanwhile, India’s R-value, which indicates the rate of spread of the virus has further reduced to 1.57 in the week from 14-21 January and the national peak of the third wave of the infection is expected to come in the next fortnight.
R-value indicates the number of people an infected person can spread the disease to. A pandemic is considered to end if this value goes below 1.
According to a preliminary analysis by IIT Madras, the R-value was recorded at 1.57 between 14 and 21 January. The number was recorded at 2.2 in the week of January 7-13 while it was 4 from January 1-6 and 2.9 from December 25- 31.
The preliminary analysis was done by computational modeling by IIT Madras’ Department of Mathematics and Centre of Excellence for Computational Mathematics and Data Science headed by Prof Neelesh S Upadhye and Prof S Sundar.
According to the data, the R-value of Mumbai was 0.67, Delhi 0.98, Chennai 1.2 and Kolkata 0.56.
Explaining further, Dr Jayant Jha, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, IIT Madras, said the R-value of Mumbai and Kolkata shows that peak is over there and it is becoming endemic while for Delhi and Chennai it is still close to 1.
“The reason for that could be that as per the new ICMR guidelines they have removed the requirement for contact tracing and therefore there are less infections as earlier,” he told news agency PTI.
Apex health body the ICMR has issued guidelines as per which contacts of coronavirus patients do not need testing unless identified as high-risk based on age or comorbidities.
Jha further said as per their analysis, the coronavirus peak is likely to come in the next 14 days till February 6.
The earlier prediction was that the peak of the third wave is likely between February 1 and February 15.
The third wave of coronavirus is being driven by the Omicron variant. The country recorded 3,33,533 new Covid-19 cases today, raising the tally to 3,92,37,264.
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