New Delhi: The third wave of Covid infections in India is unlikely to be as severe as the second, AIIMS chief Dr Randeep Guleria told NDTV Saturday morning.
However, he also cautioned against underestimating the virus and its variants - particularly the more aggressive and virulent strains - and said "we need to learn from the second... to deal with the third".
"There are a lot of debates on whether the third wave will be more severe than the second... my feeling is the subsequent wave will not be as bad as the second," Dr Guleria, head of Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences and a top government figure in the war on the coronavirus, said.
Amid concerns the third wave will be driven by the 'Delta Plus' variant - the potentially more transmissible version of the 'Delta' variant that fueled the second wave - he said the government is "closely monitoring" the situation, but the 'delta' strain is of more immediate concern.
"We are very closely monitoring that (the 'Delta Plus' variant) (but) at the moment 'Delta Plus' is not the dominant variant in India... the 'Delta' variant is. So we need to actively track it... do genome sequencing to see how this variant is behaving in our population and prepare accordingly," he said.
Even one of India's top doctors and genome sequencer has brushed aside concerns of this new mutant fuelling an upsurge in infections. Dr Anurag Agarwal, Director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), also advised caution against lowering the guard on the second wave itself.
NITI Aayog member Dr V K Paul also supported the views of Guleria and Agarwal as he said thwarting the third wave of Covid-19 pandemic is in the hands of the people as "it can be stopped if Covid appropriate behaviour is followed, and majority of the people get vaccinated".
