Washington, Jan 8: A US-based health expert has said that India will witness a peak in the number of COVID-19 cases by next month with the expectation of reporting five lakh cases per day.
He however added that “the severity of the variant will be less this time in the country than Delta variant.”
Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and Chair of the Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington said:
“You are entering the Omicron wave, as many countries around the world are, and we expect that there will be more cases per day at the peak than you had in April last year for the Delta wave, but Omicron is much less severe.”
“So, while you will have many cases and set records probably for cases. It should be less of an impact on the severity of the disease. We currently have in the models that we will release later, we expect about five lakh cases at the peak, which should come in during the next month,” he added.
As many experts in India say that the country has hybrid immunity due to which Omicron will be less effective, Dr Murray said:
“What we know from a place like South Africa where there was a tremendous amount of prior infection, both Delta as well as Beta. Vaccination doses provide considerable protection for severe disease, from hospitalisation and death, which is why we think there will be many Omicron cases in India, but much less hospitalization and death than you had in the Delta wave.”
Speaking about the number of hospitalizations and severity due to the variant, he said: “We expect that 85.2 per cent of infections will have no symptoms. They will be asymptomatic, but amongst the cases, we still expect quite a number of them to end up in hospitals and in terms of death, cases will be much reduced. So, we expect that the peak of hospital admissions in India will be about a quarter of what you had for the Delta wave, and deaths should be less of what you saw for Delta.”
Meanwhile, India saw a single-day rise of 1,41,986 new coronavirus cases, raising the tally to 3,53,68,372, which includes 3,071 cases of omicron variant reported across 27 states and union territories so far, the Union Health Ministry said on Saturday.
Of the 3,071 cases of omicron variant, 1,203 have recovered or migrated, according to the data updated by the ministry at 8 am.
Maharashtra recorded the maximum number of 876 omicron cases, followed by Delhi at 513, Karnataka 333, Rajasthan 291, Kerala 284 and Gujarat 204.
