Medical experts have warned that the volume of vaccine available to fight the coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2 in coming years is expected to fall far short of global demand, despite an unprecedented effort to manufacture billions of doses.
'Just put a patch on your arm and the vaccine can be absorbed by the body.'
Travellers coming from the United Kingdom to the national capital will have to undergo a seven-day institutional quarantine and a seven-day home quarantine even if they test negative for COVID-19 on arrival, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced on Friday.
Phase-I clinical trials have revealed "excellent safety" of the two candidate vaccines indigenously developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with Indian Council of Medical Research and Cadila Healthcare Ltd and their immunogenicity testing is now in progress, minister of state for health Ashwini Choubey informed the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.
At least 85 people have died of coronavirus with the confirmed cases crossing 4,500 in the US.
Mohabbat Singh was administered a cocktail of Casirivimab and Imdevimab at the Medanta Hospital as part of the "single dose infusion-based treatment" on Tuesday and then kept under observation.
It said clinical trials of the drug 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2-DG) showed that it helps in faster recovery of hospitalised patients and reduces supplemental oxygen dependence.
The pandemic will be over but Covid will be here to stay, the scientists said as Covid numbers begin to ebb in several parts of the world, including India.
The expose, which was in Chinese, said that the Chinese Communist Party was covering up the COVID-19 crisis and there was a human-to-human transmission of the virus.
'We really need to look seriously to see if there are any local variants.'
The Centre has warned it is likely that the spread of the new variant will outpace the Delta variant where there is community transmission.
Director of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Dr Sujeet Kumar Singh said the remaining 77 per cent are still vulnerable to the viral disease and containment measures need to continue with the same rigour.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on Saturday briefed about the new 'Omicron' variant of the coronavirus, and he asked officials to review the plans to ease international travel restrictions in light of the 'emerging new evidence.'
The apex health research body on Tuesday validated the 1,000th testing laboratory, ramping up the capacity for detection of COVID-19 in the country. Currently, three lakh samples can be tested per day, an official said.
FabiFlu is the first oral favipiravir-approved medication in India for the treatment of COVID-19. Favipiravir can be used for coronavirus patients with co-morbid conditions such as diabetes and heart disease with mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms.
However, Covid infection can spread faster during the third wave if any new virulent variant of SARS-CoV-2 emerges, said Manindra Agarwal who is working with the Sutra Model -- the mathematical projection of the COVID-19 trajectory.
'As people have moved from cities to small towns and villages, they have carried the infection into new territories.' 'Poor healthcare infrastructure in these places should be a big worry in the days to come.'
Commercial launch and supply to major government and private hospitals is expected in mid-June.
Stressing on the need to protect both lives and livelihoods, he said public health action in India and across the world must be continually guided by evidence from four key questions -- how transmissible is the variant, severity of the disease it causes, how well vaccines and prior SARS-CoV-2 infection protect and how common people perceive risk and follow control measures.
Evidence indicates that restoration of functioning of the education system as it was in pre-Covid times, as early as possible appears prudent in the current Indian context, they said.
The assurance comes as India's Covid graph dips -- on Friday 1,109 new coronavirus infections were reported -- and also one case of a new Covid strain in Mumbai.
The reduced severity of the Omicron variant is good news for now, but it is the result of an 'evolutionary mistake' and does not indicate that the virus which causes COVID-19 is becoming less virulent, a leading Indian-origin scientist from the University of Cambridge warned on Thursday.
However, experts in the fields of genome sequencing and cell science have observed that such a small sample size cannot be considered as an indication of the spread of the mutated virus.
The research on 1,276 patients from Wuhan, China, shows that around one in three people still experienced shortness of breath after 12 months, while lung impairments persisted in some patients, especially those who had experienced the most severe illness with Covid-19.
'...signatures.' 'But such signatures are missing in this virus.'
'We are already exhausted, but we can't give up.' 'The battle is still on.' 'We will see some respite by December 2021.'
Two cases of the new Omicron variant of coronavirus have been detected in Karnataka, the Union government said on Thursday while asking people not to panic but follow Covid-appropriate behaviour and get vaccinated without delay.
They stressed that classification of cases into mild, moderate and severe categories based just on respiratory symptoms should be relooked to include other organ involvement.
Congress MP Karti Chidambaram and Communist Party of India-Marxist politburo member Mohammed Salim were among the prominent politicians who tested positive for COVID-19 as a rapid spike in cases took the tally in the country to over 18 lakh on Monday.
Over 21 per cent of the population, aged 10 years and above, showed evidence of past exposure to COVID-19 in the Indian Council of Medical Research's latest national serosurvey, the government said on Thursday, noting that a large proportion of people are still vulnerable to the infection.
Though Covid cases are rising in Delhi and its satellite towns, the focus should be on hospital admissions that have remained the same or changed just marginally, say several scientists, underscoring that the uptick is not an indication of a fourth wave in the country at this point.
'People had said it will explode and everyone will die. Nothing of that sort has happened.' 'Our government has done a splendid job so far.'
The health ministry on Saturday recommended the use of antiviral drug remdesivir in moderate stage of COVID-19 while backtracking from its earlier stance on hydroxychloroquine, saying the anti-malarial drug should be used in the early course of the disease and not on critically ill patients.
Scientists associated with Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG), the government panel that conducts research on different variants of the coronavirus, said they were surprised at noted virologist Shahid Jameel's decision to quit the group and wondered whether he was disillusioned with the government's handling of the pandemic.
India's first mRNA platform-based vaccine will remain stable at 2-8 degrees Celsius while Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine needs minus 70 degrees Celsius and Moderna vaccine can remain stable for six months at minus 20 degrees Celsius, reports Sohini Das.
As the SARS-CoV2 evolves and mutates further, it is necessary to be prepared for new waves, Principal Scientific Adviser K VijayRaghavan cautioned on Wednesday, even as he said ferocity of the second wave of coronavirus in the country was not predicted.
As the pandemic spreads and the urgency for effective treatment of COVID-19 mounts, several countries, including the US, have started relying heavily on HCQ, majorly used in the treatment of malaria and rheumatoid-arthritis.
The Reproduction number or Rt refers to how many people an infected person infects on average. In other words, it can tell how efficiently a virus is spreading.
People aged 45 and above account for about 88 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in India making them the most vulnerable section, the Union health ministry said on Wednesday, a day after the government opened up vaccinations for all those in the age bracket from April 1.
Responding to another question, Choubey said that the phase-I of clinical trials have revealed excellent safety of the two candidate vaccines indigenously developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with Indian Council of Medical Research and Cadila Healthcare Ltd, and now their immunogenicity testing is in progress. Their phase II clinical trials are ongoing.
© 2026 Rediff.com - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances