|  | - India on Tuesday reported 6,990 new cases and 190 fatalities, taking the cumulative caseload to 34,587,822 (100,543 active cases) and fatalities to 468,980.
- Worldwide: Over 262.43 million cases and nearly 5.22 million fatalities.
- Vaccination in India: 1,232,502,767 doses. Worldwide: Over 7.94 billion doses.
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| | TODAY’S TAKE | | Will vaccines still protect you against Omicron? |  | - The Omicron variant has 32 mutations in its spike protein, the part the virus uses to attach itself to our cells. Covid-19 vaccines also target the spike protein, thereby raising fears the virus could be more transmissible as well as gain the ability to evade immune protection.
- But so far, there is no clear proof to say conclusively that the variant will evade vaccine-generated immunity. Also, even if they do, it is likely to be a case of a degree of reduction of efficacy — not a total failure. Which is to say, there could be more breakthrough infections. Note: The Delta variant, too, had caused more breakthrough infections.
- “Theoretically, it is possible that the new variant of concern may challenge vaccines’ efficacy,” said Raman Gangakhedkar, senior scientist and ex-head of the epidemiology and communicable diseases division of ICMR. However, he added that Covaxin and Covishield “prevent hospitalisation and death, and the same may be potent against the Omicron variant”. (He's also one of the 26 members of the WHO team appointed to examine the origins of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 that cause pandemics.)
- “People must take two doses of the vaccine — either Covishield or Covaxin — and adhere to Covid-19-appropriate behaviour,” Gangakhedkar said. The second dose boosts not only virus-specific antibodies but also the T cells (T-lymphocytes), which are memory cells and part of the broader immune response against the virus, he added, advising strict adherence to the two-dose regime.
- India’s advantage lies in the knowledge that a majority of the population has encountered the virus and acquired immunity, added senior clinical epidemiologist Amitav Banerjee. “Natural infection exposes the whole virus to the immune system of our body priming the memory or T cells to recognise any future intrusions by the same or closely-related viruses which include new variants,” he added.
- Vaccine makers have said that they can tweak existing formulations to make them more effective against new variants. A spokeswoman for Pfizer said that the company’s scientists “can adapt the current vaccine within six weeks and ship initial batches within 100 days in the event of an escape variant”. Moderna said it could update its current vaccine in about two months and have clinical results in about three months if necessary. Note: Both vaccines use lab-generated genetic material (mRNA,) and their sequence can be easily tweaked.
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| | TELL ME ONE THING | | South Africa offers hope on Omicron to India |  | - Even as the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that “the overall global risk related to the new VoC (variant of concern) Omicron is assessed as very high”, South African authorities, in an exchange with medical experts from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), have said that even though the new variant is “highly transmissible”, there have been very few hospitalisations due to its infection, according to a report by Indian Express.
- Even the South African doctor who first alerted authorities over the presence of Omicron, Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, said that patients who were infected with Omicron had shown very mild symptoms, such as “extreme tiredness”, mild muscle aches, a "scratchy throat" and dry cough — with very few having slightly high temperature. Coetzee said that while she’s “not saying that there will not be severe disease coming forward...even the patients that we have seen who are not vaccinated have mild symptoms.”
- In their exchange with ICMR and NCDC, the South Africans said that they haven’t observed any of the typical symptoms of Covid-19 in people infected with the Omicron variant — such as loss of smell or taste which was seen in other variants or even a drop in oxygen levels, which was seen in people infected with the Delta variant.
- Even the WHO, which admitted that “there is substantial uncertainty regarding Omicron’s transmissibility” and its “immune escape potential”, has said that so far there has been no death reported from anywhere in the world due to the Omicron variant, which as per the latest count, has infected 150 persons globally across 15 countries.
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